The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art

Why would a smart New York investment banker pay $12 million for the decaying, stuffed carcass of a shark? By what alchemy does Jackson Pollock’s drip painting No. 5, 1948 sell for $140 million?

Intriguing and entertaining, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark is a Freakonomics approach to the economics and psychology of the contemporary art world. Why were record prices achieved at auction for works by 131 contemporary artists in 2006 alone, with astonishing new heights reached in 2007? Don Thompson explores the money, lust, and self-overdoing of the art world in an attempt to determine what makes a particular work valuable while others are ignored.

This book is the first to look at the economics and the marketing strategies that enable the modern art market to generate such astrophysical prices. Drawing on interviews with past and present executives of auction houses and art dealerships, artists, and the buyers who go the market, Thompson launches the reader on a journey of discovery through the peculiar world of modern art. Surprising, passionate, gossipy, revelatory, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark reveals a fantastic deal that even veteran  auction purchasers do not know.

DON THOMPSON is a professor and economist at the Schulich School of Business, specializing in marketing, economic regulation, and strategic preparation. He has taught at the University of Toronto, Harvard University, and the London School of Economics, and holds an M.B.A. and Ph.D from the University of California, and an LL.M from Osgoode Hall Law School. Thompson has served as a consultant to government agencies and organizations in Canada, the US, the UK, France, Australia, Israel, China, Thailand, Laos, Oman, Sri Lanka and Turkey, consulting for companies as diverse as Procter & Gamble, IBM, Wal-Mart and British Airlines. He is the leader or co-leader of nine books.