THE $12 MILLION STUFFED SHARK: THE CURIOUS ECONOMICS OF CONTEMPORARY ART

by Don Thompson (Doubleday Canada, 268 pages, $29.95 hardcover)

"What I love to do," the Sotheby's auctioneer Tobias Meyer once said, "is to put people in front of art and make them feel it, make them stop everything else they are doing and experience it, deeply. That's how I make art expensive."

Does it seem to you that Meyer's last sentence rather spoils the high-minded aesthetics of his words? Meyer may indeed have lost some style points there, but he makes them back on honesty -- a quality not so much lacking as simply irrelevant in the world of contemporary art.

In The $12 Million Stuffed Shark, Don Thompson, an economist, art collector and professor emeritus of marketing at York University's Schulich School of Business, takes us on a hilarious, bewildering, outrageous, insert-your-own-adjective-here cruise through a murky, fluid world in which millions of dollars are paid for such objects as a medicine cabinet filled with acetaminophen tablets, and in which the quality of a work can be less important to establishing a price than the status of the dealer and auction house, the current owner of the work, the previous owners of the work, the expected future owners of the work, the owners of other works by the same artist, at what point in an auction the work came up for bids, whether a different work by the artist has recently come up for sale, what was hanging next to the work in the gallery -- you get the idea.

"Dealers and auction house specialists do not claim to be able to identify or define what will become million-dollar contemporary art," Thompson writes. "They say publicly that prices are whatever someone will pay, and privately that art buying at the most expensive end is often a game played by the superrich, with publicity and cultural distinction as the prize."

By no means the most outrageous or controversial work discussed by Thompson, though probably the best cover photo, is the title character. In 1991, the British artist Damien Hirst bought a 15-foot tiger shark from an Australian fisherman, stuffed and preserved it, mounted it in a free-swimming posture inside a transparent case, and titled it The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living -- a title surely responsible for a huge part of its sale price. "If the shark were just called Shark," Thompson writes, "the viewer might well say, 'Yes, it certainly is a shark,' and move on. Calling it The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living forces viewers to create a meaning."

The shark sold, it is reported, for $12 million. Provocative title or not, how can such a price be justified or explained? Thompson's book, which delves deeply and entertainingly into the Byzantine arrangements between artists, dealers, auction houses and buyers, is primarily an astonished attempt to answer those questions.

The key word is "branding," which means almost exactly the same thing in the high-end art world as it does in your local supermarket. When a buyer ponies up $2.16 million for Jeff Koons' New Hoover, Deluxe Shampoo Polisher, which consists of a vacuum cleaner mounted in a transparent case with fluorescent lights, he is paying for the branding, just as when a shopper chooses a name-brand soap over a store brand. A famous artist, a famous owner, a "superstar" gallery, interest from a major museum--one or more of these can "brand" a work of art as valuable and desirable.

The most entertaining chapter of many is Thompson's discourse on "auction psychology," a term that covers not just the plans and actions of bidders but the machinations of the auction houses themselves, by far the two most important of which are Sotheby's and Christie's. An auction house may, for instance, call up a museum to suggest the loan of a work that is coming up for auction. If the museum is interested, the auctioneer will certainly note during the auction itself that, "There is a request that this work be loaned to an exhibition at MOMA (Museum of Modern Art in New York City) . . . " The effect of this "request" on the final selling price? Probably millions.

Thompson never does explain -- never tries to, in fact -- why or whether a stuffed shark is worth $12 million. What he does succeed in explaining, and brilliantly, is why someone would pay $12 million for a stuffed shark -- a very different question. In this case, it was primarily a combination of Damien Hirst's name (he is among the best-known and most-valued of contemporary artists) and the admiration of Charles Saatchi, probably the most influential collector in the world, who funded the creation of the work. Other works of art have relied on different factors, or different combinations of factors, but at bottom, it all comes down to branding.

In other words, just how impressed will your friends be when they step into your living room and see a Warhol or a Picasso on the wall? Or a 15-foot stuffed, rotting shark?

Hal Goodman is an editor, writer and musician living in Waterloo. He has written extensively for The New York Times Book Review and Travel sections, and for many other publications.