The Art Dealer’s Apprentice tells the story of how the author moved to New York in 1989 as a young Midwesterner, found a job at an Upper East Side gallery, and became the protégé of Carla Panicali, an Italian countess and major international art world figure. From Carla – an extraordinary woman whom he deeply admired – the author learned to navigate the treacherous waters of authenticity, power and money in the art business and his own life. As gallery director, he gradually piloted the gallery through a sea of fakes, frauds, and unscrupulous colleagues, competitors, collectors and experts, until the art market crashed, and in the ensuing crisis, in the increasingly money-driven art world of the 1990s, he came to question even the authenticity of his friendship with Carla. In The Art Dealer’s Apprentice, the author recounts how he learned the New York art business from the inside, including the roles of dealers, auction houses, runners, collectors and experts; the personal histories of famous artists and the art historical importance and salability of their work; and how paintings and sculptures were (or were not) authenticated and sold, often based, surprisingly, on factors having little to do with the artwork itself. The author also details how international business was done, in some cases through illicit transport of artworks, payoffs to experts, and Swiss bank accounts. Increasingly disillusioned, the author ultimately concludes that by the early 1990s, the art business was no longer really about art.

In the late 1960s Elmyr (pronounced el-MEER) de Hory was the world's most talented-and most successful art forger-ever. For over 20 years his bogus masterpieces filtered into prestigious collections on five continents. In 1967 his chicanery ended in a scandal that rocked the art world, although this monocle-wearing charmer's artful deception did not end there. He seduced most everyone he met, counting Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor, Montgomery Clift, Rita Hayworth, and Orson Welles among his friends. As a young American Midwesterner, I fell under his spell when I met Elmyr in 1969 on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza, becoming his personal assistant while he became my mentor and closest friend. His hilltop villa was my university where, beyond the glamour of the rich and famous, the people I met seemed to spring from the mind of Lewis Carroll, and life appeared LSD-inspired in its strangeness. Elmyr also had deeper secrets than anyone knew.This memoir is a coming-of-age journey of discovery providing the most personal account of this "famously infamous" faker that finally untangles the longstanding mythology about his life. It is a story marked by outrageous humor, tragedy, love, and search for the truth as seen through the eyes of his prot�g�-the Forger's Apprentice.

Before the foundation of academies of art in London in 1758 and Philadelphia in 1805, most individuals who were to emerge as artists trained in workshops of varying degrees of relevance. Easel painters began their careers apprenticed to carriage, house, sign or ship painters, whilst a few were placed with those who made pictures. Sculptors emerged from a training as ornamental plasterers or carvers. Of the many other trades in a position to offer an appropriate background were ÔlimningÕ, staining, engraving, surveying, chasing and die-sinking. In addition, plumbers gained the right to use oil painting and, for plasterers, the application of distemper was an extension of their trade. Central to the theme of this book is the notion that, for those who were to become either painters or sculptor, a training in a trade met their practical needs. This ÔtrainingÕ was of an altogether different nature to an ÔeducationÕ in an art school. In the past, prospective artists were offered, by means of apprenticeships, an empirical rather than a theoretical understanding of their ultimate vocation. James Ayres provides a lively account of the inter-relationship between art and trade in the late seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries, in both Britain and North America. He demonstrates with numerous, illustrated examples, the many cross-overs in the Ôart and mysteryÕ of artistic training, and, to modern eyes, the sometimes incongruous relationships between the various trades that contributed to the blossoming of many artistic careers, including some of the most illustrious names of the ÔlongÕ eighteenth century.

This book explores the organization of creative industries, including the visual and performing arts, movies, theater, sound recordings, and book publishing. In each, artistic inputs are combined with other, "humdrum" inputs. But the deals that bring these inputs together are inherently problematic: artists have strong views; the muse whispers erratically; and consumer approval remains highly uncertain until all costs have been incurred. To assemble, distribute, and store creative products, business firms are organized, some employing creative personnel on long-term contracts, others dealing with them as outside contractors; agents emerge as intermediaries, negotiating contracts and matching creative talents with employers. Firms in creative industries are either small-scale pickers that concentrate on the selection and development of new creative talents or large-scale promoters that undertake the packaging and widespread distribution of established creative goods. In some activities, such as the performing arts, creative ventures facing high fixed costs turn to nonprofit firms. To explain the logic of these arrangements, the author draws on the analytical resources of industrial economics and the theory of contracts. He addresses the winner-take-all character of many creative activities that brings wealth and renown to some artists while dooming others to frustration; why the "option" form of contract is so prevalent; and why even savvy producers get sucked into making "ten-ton turkeys," such as Heaven's Gate. However different their superficial organization and aesthetic properties, whether high or low in cultural ranking, creative industries share the same underlying organizational logic.

The Mifflin Smith Collection of masterworks from the Low Countries and the surrounding region is a small but important aggregation of sixteenth to eighteenth century old master paintings. Seventeenth century Dutch and Flemish masterworks are unquestionably the focal point of these twenty-five highly selective and carefully chosen paintings.

This book provides a new history of the changing relationship between art, craft and industry focusing on the transition from workshop to studio, apprentice to pupil, guild to gallery and artisan to artist. Responding to the question whether the artist is a relic of the feudal mode of production or is a commodity producer corresponding to the capitalist mode of cultural production, this inquiry reveals, instead, that the history of the formation of art as distinct from handicraft, commerce and industry can be traced back to the dissolution of the dual system of guild and court. This history needs to be revisited in order to rethink the categories of aesthetic labour, attractive labour, alienated labour, nonalienated labour and unwaged labour that shape the modern and contemporary politics of work in art.