An Object of Beauty

Author: Steve Martin

Release: November 23, 2010

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Genre: Fiction, Art

ISBN-10: 0446573647
ISBN-13: 978-0446573641

Main Character: Lacey Yeager

Synopsis: Lacey Yeager is young, captivating, and ambitious enough to take the NYC art world by storm. Groomed at Sotheby’s and hungry to keep climbing the social and career ladders put before her, Lacey charms men and women, old and young, rich and even richer with her magnetic charisma and liveliness. Her ascension to the highest tiers of the city parallel the soaring heights–and, at times, the dark lows–of the art world and the country from the late 1990s through today.

Declassified by Agent Palmer: An Object of Beauty is in the Eye of the Bookholder

Quotes and Lines

My goal, once I discovered that my artistic aspirations were not accompanied by artistic talent, was to learn to write about art with effortless clarity. This is not as easy at it sounds: whenever I attempted it, I found myself in a convoluted rhetorical tangle from which there was no exit.

Lacey was just as happy alone as with company. When she was alone, she was potential; with others she was realized.

“You have the collector’s disease.”
“Not a disease. A disease makes you feel bad. I have a mania, an acquisitive gene. Pictures come through me like a moving train through a station. I only need to own them once.”

Lacey’s parents, Hart and Meg, were intelligent and cultured, two qualities that tide along effortlessly in households where the discussion of art is routine, though it’s difficult to tell which is the chicken and which is the egg.

When Christmas came, she went home to her parents in Atlanta and pretended that everything was fine. But now, away from New York, the idea of selling art after the apocalypse seemed frivolous.

“I believe the last twenty years has been the most desperate search for artistic identity in the history of arts.”

Art as an aesthetic principle was supported by thousands of years of discernment and psychic rewards, but art as a commodity was held up by air.