Works on paper

Behind gallery walls
An entire season of Gossip Girl can’t offer as much decadent and well-dressed drama as Sarah Thornton finds during her Seven Days in the Art World (W.W. Norton, $24.95). To discover what makes the contemporary art market tick, the London-based sociologist talks to artists, critics, dealers, curators, air-kissing zillionaire collectors and M.F.A. students who cultivate their quirks as carefully as their work. The 250-plus interviews she conducted, some with laughable egomaniacs, give her enjoyable writing an authoritative edge. Thornton also has a knack for soliciting spot-on quotes: “It’s the only place where you can give away free booze and no one turns up,” video artist Phil Collins says of the commercial art world.

The titular “seven days” correspond to Thornton’s visits to a Christie’s auction, Art Basel, a CalArts student critique, the Tate Britain’s Turner Prize ceremony, Artforum’s offices, Takashi Murakami’s studio and the Venice Biennale. Everywhere she goes, she asks what an artist is and how one recognizes “good” art. The number of people who take offense at these questions reflects the elitism of the art world Thornton portrays: To many of the collectors she meets, art just seems to be a classier status symbol than a Ferrari, while the artists and academics who disdain the market use impenetrable jargon to separate themselves from the masses.

One wishes Thornton’s art world extended beyond the coasts—at least critic Jerry Saltz admits he’s from Chicago—and her self-described ethnography would benefit from conversations with both museumgoers and working artists who aren’t art stars. Still, Seven Days is great, CW-worthy fun. Available at Women and Children First (5233 N Clark St, 773-769-9299).

Not-so-strange phenomena
If Thornton asked Temporary Services what an artist is, the group would point to a Chicagoan reserving a postsnowstorm parking space with chairs.

Founded in Chicago in 1998, Temporary Services is a collective made up of Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin and Marc Fischer, who initiate art projects on their own and with other nonprofits around the world. They don’t distinguish between highfalutin “art practice” and “other creative human endeavors,” as they write in their new book Public Phenomena (Half Letter Press, $15). While Thornton portrays art as ensnared by capitalism, the projects documented in Public Phenomena’s photographs and essays can’t be sold. Of course, these works also wouldn’t be considered art by the ordinary people who put them on the streets of Chicago, Ljubljana, Mexico City and Mumbai.

The book’s contributors find aesthetic interest and expressions of individual or communal intent in roadside memorials, makeshift fences, signs listing block clubs’ rules of conduct and the aforementioned parking-place savers. Instead of exclusive institutions, Public Phenomena focuses on the street and public space. Temporary Services presents jerry-rigged basketball hoops, for example, as suggestions for using our neighborhoods differently: They demonstrate that Chicago needs more athletic fields—and that we don’t have to wait for the city to give them to us.

True to its name, the group proposes that public art doesn’t have to last forever; it contends that the slim volume’s examples of urban creativity respond to people’s changing needs more effectively than an object that requires eternal maintenance. We think Chicago needs both: “The Bean” serves a purpose as a powerful symbol, drawing people together more effectively than a traffic cone. But while Seven Days probably will depress anyone poorer than Damien Hirst, Public Phenomena cheerfully reminds us that you don’t need a six-figure M.F.A. to make art or a six-figure salary to experience it. Available at Quimby’s (1854 W North Ave, 773-342-0910).

For more suggestions, visit our 2008 Gift Guide at timeoutchicago.com/art.