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Summary
Summary
Lacey Yeager is young, captivating, and ambitious enough to take the NYC art world by storm. Groomed at Sotheby's and hungry to keep climbing the social and career ladders put before her, Lacey charms men and women, old and young, rich and even richer with her magnetic charisma and liveliness. Her ascension to the highest tiers of the city parallel the soaring heights--and, at times, the dark lows--of the art world and the country from the late 1990s through today.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Martin compresses the wild and crazy end of the millennium and finds in this piercing novel a sardonic morality tale. Lacey Yeager is an ambitious young art dealer who uses everything at her disposal to advance in the world of the high-end art trade in New York City. After cutting her teeth at Sotheby's, she manipulates her way up through Barton Talley's gallery of "Very Expensive Paintings," sleeping with patrons, and dodging and indulging in questionable deals, possible felonies, and general skeeviness until she opens her own gallery in Chelsea. Narrated by Lacey's journalist friend, Daniel Franks, whose droll voice is a remarkable stand-in for Martin's own, the world is ordered and knowable, blindly barreling onward until 9/11. And while Lacey and the art she peddles survive, the wealth and prestige garnered by greed do not. Martin (an art collector himself) is an astute miniaturist as he exposes the sound and fury of the rarified Manhattan art world. If Shopgirl was about the absence of purpose, this book is about the absence of a moral compass, not just in the life of an adventuress but for an entire era. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The NYC art world, seen through the eyes of its most impartial constituents.In his latest novel, Martin (Born Standing Up, 2007, etc.) unveils an ambitious and heartfelt analysis of both the complexity and absurdity of the Manhattan art market. It begins, appropriately enough, with a confession. "I am tired, so very tired of thinking about Lacey Yeager, yet I worry that unless I write her story down, and see the manuscript bound and tidy on my bookshelf, I will be unable to ever write about anything else." This declaration spills from arts writer David Franks, who finds a small universe encapsulated in the life of his subject, ex-lover Lacey. From this humble beginning, David chronicles the rise and fall of the fine-art market from the late '90s through the present day, complete with record-breaking prices, art thefts and the premature globalization of a complex system. After college, Lacey and David enter the burgeoning artistic world, Lacey as a grunt at Sotheby's, David as a struggling writer. David habitually profiles Lacey, an insanely determined dealer with a passion for creativity and wealth. Martin offers fascinating literary capers, mixing in real-life elements like a fictional run-in with novelist John Updike and the spectacular $500 million dollar theft at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner museum. As Lacey graduates to art speculation and gallery ownership, Martin populates her world with a host of compelling characters, among them a desperately infatuated Parisian broker, a manipulative and powerful mentor, and Pilot Mouse, a minor boyfriend who reinvents himself as a Banksy-like artistic guerrilla. To add to the reader's experience, Martin includes reproductions of artwork referenced in the text, lending another layer of sophistication to an already absorbing story.An artfully told tale of trade, caste and the obsessive mindset of collectors.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
This thoroughly engaging primer on the art world is unusual on a number of levels. Although the lead characters are unlikable, the novel is hard to put down, offers an enlightening explication of how the market for art is created, and includes photos and absorbing detail on many of the artworks under discussion. The narrator, Daniel Franks, is an arts journalist who relates the story of avaricious, amoral Lacey Yeager, who is willing to do almost anything to move ahead in the art world. After landing an entry-level job at Sotheby's, where her stint cataloging dusty works in the basement helps develop her eye for good art, Lacey moves on to working in a gallery, where she makes many important connections among collectors and dealers before opening her own gallery in Chelsea. Along the way, she sleeps with artists, collectors, and, finally, an FBI agent who investigates malfeasance in the art world. This page-turner is likely to make readers feel like they have been given a backstage pass to an elite world few are privileged to observe. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The best-selling author draws on his experience as a renowned art collector for this clever, convincingly detailed depiction of NYC's art scene.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Steve Martin's novel is set in the world of high-stakes art dealers and collectors. AS Woody Allen used to be indistinguishable from Manhattan, so Steve Martin has long been associated with Hollywood. Big-budget romantic comedies; tuxedoed pratfalls at award ceremonies; a long-running genial middle age. Banged out between screenplays, wives and banjo-playing sessions (there seems no form of entertainment he hasn't mastered, though he abandoned standup comedy years ago), Martin's first novel, "Shopgirl," centered on a winsome employee at the Beverly Hills Neiman Marcus glove counter. His second, "The Pleasure of My Company," was about an obsessive-compulsive lonely-hearts in Santa Monica. Both explored sharp corners of the soft-focus world he usually inhabits. "An Object of Beauty," however, is a paean to New York City, and its heroine, Lacey Yeager, the kind of callous creature who exists only there. Young, ambitious and bewitching (though not top-tier beautiful), identifying unapologetically with the wily foxes of children's fables, she is a Lily Bart for the new millennium, her ultimate goal not marriage but a wildly remunerative art gallery in Chelsea. "She wanted fine things, beautiful things," Lacey realizes, feeling "dipped . . . in an elixir" as she contemplates a borrowed Milton Avery in her studio apartment over a glass of Scotch. The story gathers speed in the late 1990s - a moment when "art was about to acquire the aura of an internationally recognizable asset, a unique and emotional emblem of the good life" - but she's not the sort of girl to slosh around with a cosmo. Impetuous and fabulous, sensually and sexually uninhibited (Ecstasy, not laudanum, is her drug of choice), Lacey drives men mad, starting with the novel's narrator, a freelance art journalist named, as if to underscore his reliability, Daniel Franks, who slept with Lacey once in college but, he assures us, has "sufficiently armored myself against her allure by viewing her as a science project." Daniel's life is dull, or as he puts it, "on a gentle gradient moving quietly upward," which gives him the ideal vantage point from which to observe Lacey's fascinating and chaotic one. It features a few brief flings with painters and a more sustained affair with a French client named, as if to underscore his basic goodness, Patrice Claire, who meekly submits to Lacey's request that he use less hair "product" and hops on the Concorde every time she arches an eyebrow. ("An Object of Beauty" is rich in this kind of upper-class period detail, though its sex scenes have a 19th-century primness.) But - refreshingly, considering that she is swanning through chick lit's high period - it is not love that is Lacey's primary project, but career advancement, the pursuit of which leads her to acts of subterfuge that suggest callowness at best, a sociopathic streak at worst. (It will ruin nothing to reveal that one involves the old-fashioned steaming open of an envelope.) Like Bart before her, she collects not friends but admirers, mentors and supporters. "She considered no one her peer," Daniel writes, having shifted from enchantment to exhaustion. "Lacey had an extraordinary sense of position: who was above her, who was below her." What keeps her endearing is her sense of adventure and genuine passion for art. One memorable scene has her whizzing through the National Gallery in Washington, her feet "a futurist blur" as her eyes bulge out on cartoon springs at the splendor on display. The action also advances at Sotheby's, where our determined protagonist joins a "spice rack" of young subterranean lovelies fluffing the wares for trade; at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston; at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg; and at the modernist home of a private collector in Los Angeles, where, the narrator notes, the far-flung public art reserves are best negotiated "by Swiss gondola or light aircraft." The expertise of Martin, himself a long-time collector who has endowed a gallery at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is dazzlingly in evidence here. The text is as useful an idiosyncratic art-history primer as it is a piece of fiction, with a generous smattering of illustration plates that include John Singer Sargent's "El Jaleo" along with more obscure works. As fiction, though, it is thoroughly delightful, evoking a vanished gilded age with impertinence but never contempt (and with a feather-light touch; the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, for example, appear literally as a minor impediment to Lacey's bicycle ride down the primrose path). Though Martin is merciless at parsing the pretension of the contemporary art scene - the critical jargon of "dichotomies" and "dialogues," with inanimate works mounted to converse with each other; the intentionally bad creations that offer "comment" on the whole racket; the sudden vogue for, say, framelessness - its suffusion with international cash clearly thrills and animates him. His minor characters (a dopey receptionist, a kinky F.B.I. agent, a conveniently bulimic dealer) are as carefully drawn as his major ones. There are also amusing walk-ons from real life, like the New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl, the dealer Larry Gagosian and, in the form of a stranger on a train, John Updike. "Sit down, father figure," Lacey invites him, as only a Lacey type could. And we all know the type: the idealized human being who remains ever out of reach - the title's elusive object of beauty, which, as Daniel writes wryly of the most avid collectors, "would make everything right, would complete the jigsaw of their lives, would satisfy eternally." Who cares if he's talking about the love of art or the art of love? The heroine is the kind of callous creature who exists only in New York City. Alexandra Jacobs is an editor for the Thursday and Sunday Styles sections of The Times.
Library Journal Review
The multitalented comedian, musician, and author of The Pleasure of My Company examines the New York fine arts scene from its late-1990s heyday to the present. Lacey Yeager is an up-and-coming art dealer who uses her beauty, ingenuity, and lack of social conscience to rise from lowly Sotheby's staffer to owner of an exclusive gallery. Daniel Franks, a mild-mannered freelance art writer and Lacey's one-time lover, chronicles her calculated transformation much like Nick Carraway does with Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby-as an outsider, fascinated by an enigmatic woman whom Daniel describes as "curiously, disturbingly guilt-free." Verdict While the ending is abrupt and unsatisfying and the character of Daniel is marginally pathetic, Lacey is an intriguing puzzle. Some readers may be shocked at the vulgar language and frank sexuality; others will find it honest. Plates of paintings mentioned in the text are a welcome addition. Martin's celebrity alone is reason to purchase this title; his agile musings on art and the business of art will give book clubs much to discuss. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/10.]-Christine Perkins, Bellingham P.L., WA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
