An Object of Beauty

An Object of Beauty, by Steve Martin, Weidenfeld RRP£16.99, 295 pages

Lacey Yeagar would sell her own grandmother. And, in the course of this romp through New York’s pre-crash art world, she does.

There’s crazy money to be made, and Lacey wants it. She has a body she puts to good use and the moral scruples of an alleycat. Her rise to gallery owner begins in the relative respectability of Sotheby’s but soon she is out into the high-stakes world of the contemporary galleries, fuelled by the proceeds of a scam that – although Steve Martin does his best to provoke some suspense – is surprising only in its cold-heartedness.

Lacey meets Patrice, a suave Frenchman who dines only at restaurant tables which are, in social terms, “prime real estate”. He has all the life of a cardboard cut-out but even so, Lacey treats him to her usual business methods: “When she saw Patrice turning on to the landing from the stairwell, she opened her legs and lifted her skirt slightly, showing him a flash of polka-dot underwear.”

Clad in dresses that “look smart uptown and vintage downtown”, Lacey moves between the Upper East Side and the gallery district south of 26th Street, congratulating herself on her cool (“She couldn’t sleep with Chagall but she had slept with Pilot Mouse”) and her business acumen.

Martin uses her to give us a tour d’horizon of the art world, from dodgy auction house ethics via suspected stolen goods to the murky business of arranging loans in Russia, right up to the final bitter ironies of contemporary art that commands exorbitant prices one day and is pointless and worthless the next.

On the September day when the Dow falls 768 points, the art market falls through the floor and Lacey goes with it, the author turns all moral on us. The bad girl gets her comeuppance; we get homilies on worth versus value.

A book by a brilliant stand-up comic promises some laughs but here some of the hilarity is unintentionally caused by the editors’ failure to save the hapless author from writing things such as “diversity bounced around like marbles on concrete”. There’s also a structure that includes a first person narrator who stumbles in and out of the plot and the narrative’s grammatical framework as if he was left over from a previous draft. That said, there is much to enjoy here: it’s an essentially silly book that can suddenly, unexpectedly, tell you something that you hadn’t thought of.

Jan Dalley is the FT’s arts editor