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About Boom

The meteoric rise of the largest unregulated financial market in the world -- for contemporary art -- is driven by a few passionate, guileful, and very hard-nosed dealers. They can make and break careers and fortunes “Shnayerson tackles his subject with gusto, parading a cast of colorful characters and charting how contemporary art went from being a tiny initiates-only part of the market to an international juggernaut.” — Financial Times The contemporary art market is an international juggernaut, throwing off multimillion-dollar deals. But none of it would happen without the dealers—the tastemakers who back emerging artists and steer them to success. Boom is a revelatory history of how art dealers have created, steered, and manipulated the market for contemporary art. Michael Shnayerson traces the meteoric rise of the most renowned names in contemporary art: Larry Gagosian, David Zwirner, Arne Glimcher, Iwan Wirth. From the early days on 57th Street to the rise of SoHo in the ’60s to the emergence of Chelsea as the hotbed of art galleries, it’s a story of backstabbing, betrayals, fruitful partnerships, and ever larger sums of money.