I’ve been researching this for years and longing to write it, but other projects and life got in the way.
I owe many many thanks to a large number of friends and acquaintances who’ve variously visited art exhibitions with me, talked and laughed and expostulated with me about conceptual art, listened to my rants and given me helpful suggestions. I have to single out Colm de Barra, Lizzie Bawdon, Rob Bryant, Tony Cahill, Stephen Cang, Mary Devine, Emily Dyer, Barbara Sweetman FitzGerald, Elizabeth Gibbons, Dylan Haskins, Imogen Hartmann, Jo Henderson, Lucinda Hodge, David Martin Jones, Kathryn Kennison, John Lippitt, Jason McCue, James McGuire, Janet McIver, Sean O’Callaghan, Robert Salisbury, Alec Swanson, and David Stuart Taylor, but there were several others.
My beloved Carol Scott, who has been my minder for twenty one years, was as wonderful as ever. Jane Conway-Gordon (who has the misfortune to be my agent as well as close friend) performed the delicate calculation of knowing when to kick me and when to empathise. Nina Clarke, as ever, was the great encourager and made valuable comments on the manuscript, as did my brother Owen, generous, as always, with his time and his prodigious knowledge.
I feel real gratitude to those of my readers who kept nagging me to get writing fiction again, to my American agent, Jane Chelius, and to all at Poisoned Pen for keeping the faith, particularly Barbara Peters, the Evil Editor revered by all, Rob Rosenwald, and Jessica Tribble.
I read many books and much journalism relating to the madder aspects of the art world. I owe most to Roger Kimball’s
The Rape of the Masters
(which also provided the epigraph), Don Thompson’s
The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art and Auction Houses
, Sarah Thornton’s
Seven Days in the Art World,
to the Stuckist website,
and to the art criticism of Brian Sewell, who so often seemed to be the only sane person in the lunatic asylum that is the world of contemporary art.
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