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From Manet to Manhattan: The Rise of the Modern Art Market
A behind-the-scenes look at the world's art market reveals the art connoisseurs, collectors, artists, dealers, and auction houses that have shaped tastes in art and created record-breaking sales for art masterpieces. 25,000 first printing. $35,000 ad/promo.
558 pages, Hardcover
First published November 17, 1992
4 people are currently reading
146 people want to read
About the author
Peter Watson
119 books331 followersPeter Watson was educated at the universities of Durham, London and Rome, and was awarded scholarships in Italy and the United States.
After a stint as Deputy Editor of New Society magazine, he was for four years part of the Sunday Times ‘Insight’ team of investigative journalists. He wrote the daily Diary column of the London Times before becoming that paper’s New York correspondent. He returned to London to write a column about the art world for the Observer and then at The Sunday Times.
He has published three exposes in the world of art and antiquities and from 1997 to 2007 was a Research Associate at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge. He has published twelve books of non-fiction and seven novels, some under the pen name of Mackenzie Ford. He lives in London where his interests include theatre, opera and fishing.
Awards, Etc.
Psychology Prize
Durham University, 1961
Italian Government Music Scholarship
Rome University, 1965
United States Government Bursary “for future world leaders”
To study the psychiatric profession and its links to the administration of justice
Books of the Year
Psychology Today Magazine, 1978, for War on the Mind
Daily Mail, 1990, for Wisdom and Strength
Independent on Sunday, for A Terrible Beauty, 2000
Times Literary Supplement, for Ideas, 2005
Time Magazine, for The Medici Conspiracy, 2006
Queen’s Pardon
Copy from Patrick Meehan after I had written a series of articles which brought about his release from prison after he had been wrongly convicted of murder, 1976.
Gold Dagger – Crime Writers’ Association of Great Britain
For The Caravaggio Conspiracy, 1983
Beacon Award – SAFE Award – Saving Antiquities for Everyone
For The Medici Conspiracy, 2006
US Library Association
The Great Divide.
Emmy Nomination
‘The Caravaggio Conspiracy, 1984.
Best sellers
The Caravaggio Conspiracy
Crusade
Landscape of Lies
Sotheby’s: The Inside Story
Nureyev
Lectures
Peter Watson has lectured at the following venues:
Universities
Cambridge
Berkeley
London
UCLA
Birmingham
Georgia
Georgia
Chicago
Birmingham
Santiago de Chile
York
Madrid
Harvard
Tufts
Military Bases
Fort Bragg
Private Institutions in
Cleveland
Berlin
Chicago
Belfast
Los Angeles
New York
Washington
Boston
Palm Beach
Other venues
Smithsonian Institution
National Museum, Copenhagen
Royal Society of Arts
Rugby School
Royal Library, Copenhagen
Festivals
Edinburgh
Oxford
Dartington
York
After a stint as Deputy Editor of New Society magazine, he was for four years part of the Sunday Times ‘Insight’ team of investigative journalists. He wrote the daily Diary column of the London Times before becoming that paper’s New York correspondent. He returned to London to write a column about the art world for the Observer and then at The Sunday Times.
He has published three exposes in the world of art and antiquities and from 1997 to 2007 was a Research Associate at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge. He has published twelve books of non-fiction and seven novels, some under the pen name of Mackenzie Ford. He lives in London where his interests include theatre, opera and fishing.
Awards, Etc.
Psychology Prize
Durham University, 1961
Italian Government Music Scholarship
Rome University, 1965
United States Government Bursary “for future world leaders”
To study the psychiatric profession and its links to the administration of justice
Books of the Year
Psychology Today Magazine, 1978, for War on the Mind
Daily Mail, 1990, for Wisdom and Strength
Independent on Sunday, for A Terrible Beauty, 2000
Times Literary Supplement, for Ideas, 2005
Time Magazine, for The Medici Conspiracy, 2006
Queen’s Pardon
Copy from Patrick Meehan after I had written a series of articles which brought about his release from prison after he had been wrongly convicted of murder, 1976.
Gold Dagger – Crime Writers’ Association of Great Britain
For The Caravaggio Conspiracy, 1983
Beacon Award – SAFE Award – Saving Antiquities for Everyone
For The Medici Conspiracy, 2006
US Library Association
The Great Divide.
Emmy Nomination
‘The Caravaggio Conspiracy, 1984.
Best sellers
The Caravaggio Conspiracy
Crusade
Landscape of Lies
Sotheby’s: The Inside Story
Nureyev
Lectures
Peter Watson has lectured at the following venues:
Universities
Cambridge
Berkeley
London
UCLA
Birmingham
Georgia
Georgia
Chicago
Birmingham
Santiago de Chile
York
Madrid
Harvard
Tufts
Military Bases
Fort Bragg
Private Institutions in
Cleveland
Berlin
Chicago
Belfast
Los Angeles
New York
Washington
Boston
Palm Beach
Other venues
Smithsonian Institution
National Museum, Copenhagen
Royal Society of Arts
Rugby School
Royal Library, Copenhagen
Festivals
Edinburgh
Oxford
Dartington
York
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 3, 2024
I have wanted to read this book since I read Edward Chancellor’s excellent book on economic bubbles, Devil Take The Hindmost, which contained a whole chapter on the speculative boom in the Japanese art market of the nineties. This book was written just as that was all falling apart, but Watson is at least informed or insightful enough to remark at the end of this book:
‘If money is all you are interested in, look upon the art market as a speculator’s market. Wait for a boom and then act quickly. This may not be a very attractive position to take, morally or aesthetically, but it is what the evidence suggests.’
What the book really brought home to me – someone who is interested in art history, who came to adulthood in a time probably the most inimical to working artists in history, and getting worse this decade – is that art can’t exist without someone to buy it. If this strikes you as a jejune comment, well, that’s because it is. You can’t have a Van Gogh worth 18 million unless you correspondingly have someone who can spend 18 million on it, over and above their daily needs, and the upkeep of their dozen mansions and so on. As a well-paid person who is probably in the top 10% of earners in my country, I still struggled to live in the capital city, and would scrape by in a place like Paris or London. Like most people, my ‘excess’ money is devoted to my living standards, and five hundred euro would be a LOT to spend on a piece of art. If an artist could make a piece per week that sold for that every week, that would be one thing. But like many things in the modern world, the big bucks are limited. It’s notable that the people making money from the big deals and art turnovers are not the artists, many of whom are dead, but the buyers. Watson also remarks that no great art movement or style came out of the late twentieth century; I presume the great movement of the early twenty-first will, alas, be AI.
‘The concept of the virtuoso grew out of the movement in the arts known as Mannerism, which was often larded with mysticism. Together these implied that the arts contained hidden truths available only to the initiated, and that intimate acquaintance with the arts was a civilising and therefore a virtuous preoccupation.’
I like this.
‘[...] art dealing [...] began to show signs of a commodity market, where the article traded has its external value as a painting complemented by an abstracted value as a speculative asset.” And this was 220 years ago.’
Another thing I learned was that the treatment of art pieces as speculative commodities is not new. For some reason, who knows why, I found this reassuring. People do be peopling.
‘I refer to that class … which, possessing no precise taste for anything in particular, pursue everything with an eye to speculation, [and] buy in order to sell.’ FC Joullain, an art dealer in the 1700s
Plus ça change!
‘Thanks to the shipping boom inadvertently created by Nasser, the Greeks were the first to bid enormous amounts in the salesrooms for Impressionists and Post-Impressionists.’
It’s really fun to read about the butterfly effects of such weird stuff. Little did Nasser think he would be part-way responsible for the massive prices of an artist who sold no work in his own lifetime.
Like many non-fiction books, some of the best writing is actually the quotes:
Mitchell Kennerly: ‘Without books, God is silent.’
Frank Stella: ‘Abstractionism had not come up with a really viable substitute for the human figure.’
‘One answer, of course, is that the art market is not, never has been, never will be, and perhaps never should be a wholly rational market. Take away the passion for painting or porcelain and you take away the point.’
True enough!
‘If money is all you are interested in, look upon the art market as a speculator’s market. Wait for a boom and then act quickly. This may not be a very attractive position to take, morally or aesthetically, but it is what the evidence suggests.’
What the book really brought home to me – someone who is interested in art history, who came to adulthood in a time probably the most inimical to working artists in history, and getting worse this decade – is that art can’t exist without someone to buy it. If this strikes you as a jejune comment, well, that’s because it is. You can’t have a Van Gogh worth 18 million unless you correspondingly have someone who can spend 18 million on it, over and above their daily needs, and the upkeep of their dozen mansions and so on. As a well-paid person who is probably in the top 10% of earners in my country, I still struggled to live in the capital city, and would scrape by in a place like Paris or London. Like most people, my ‘excess’ money is devoted to my living standards, and five hundred euro would be a LOT to spend on a piece of art. If an artist could make a piece per week that sold for that every week, that would be one thing. But like many things in the modern world, the big bucks are limited. It’s notable that the people making money from the big deals and art turnovers are not the artists, many of whom are dead, but the buyers. Watson also remarks that no great art movement or style came out of the late twentieth century; I presume the great movement of the early twenty-first will, alas, be AI.
‘The concept of the virtuoso grew out of the movement in the arts known as Mannerism, which was often larded with mysticism. Together these implied that the arts contained hidden truths available only to the initiated, and that intimate acquaintance with the arts was a civilising and therefore a virtuous preoccupation.’
I like this.
‘[...] art dealing [...] began to show signs of a commodity market, where the article traded has its external value as a painting complemented by an abstracted value as a speculative asset.” And this was 220 years ago.’
Another thing I learned was that the treatment of art pieces as speculative commodities is not new. For some reason, who knows why, I found this reassuring. People do be peopling.
‘I refer to that class … which, possessing no precise taste for anything in particular, pursue everything with an eye to speculation, [and] buy in order to sell.’ FC Joullain, an art dealer in the 1700s
Plus ça change!
‘Thanks to the shipping boom inadvertently created by Nasser, the Greeks were the first to bid enormous amounts in the salesrooms for Impressionists and Post-Impressionists.’
It’s really fun to read about the butterfly effects of such weird stuff. Little did Nasser think he would be part-way responsible for the massive prices of an artist who sold no work in his own lifetime.
Like many non-fiction books, some of the best writing is actually the quotes:
Mitchell Kennerly: ‘Without books, God is silent.’
Frank Stella: ‘Abstractionism had not come up with a really viable substitute for the human figure.’
‘One answer, of course, is that the art market is not, never has been, never will be, and perhaps never should be a wholly rational market. Take away the passion for painting or porcelain and you take away the point.’
True enough!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 of 1 review