The Auctioneer
Adventures in the Art Trade

Simon de Pury's tone-deaf anecdotes about his time in the high-flying world of art mostly want me to lead a bunch of pitchfork wielding peasants to his door to roust him and his ballerina-avant-garde portraitist-lingerie-model girlfriend.......more

Although I enjoyed a look into the distanced, absurd world of art dealing, I had some major problems with this book. First, de Pury never seems to acknowledge his own privileged upbringing. Growing up as part of the Swiss elite, de Pury admits multiple times that he was never a good student. But nat......more

The jacket promises a gossipy tell-all style trip through the high-priced art world. What the text delivers is the autobiography of an auctioneer few people have heard of. There is a lot of name dropping but the references mean little to anyone who wasn't part of the jet-set in Europe in the 1970s.......more

An intruging insight into the unusual world of art auctions but also into the man himself, Simon de Pury, who provides compelling anecdotes , 'gossip' about a wide range of rich and famous people and the fascinating world of auctioning which is obviously an adrenaline rush for those involved. His st......more