Sarah L. Thornton | |
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Born | 1965 (age 57–58) |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Strathclyde University, Glasgow |
Academic work | |
Main interests |
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Notable works | 7 Days in the Art World 33 Artists in 3 Acts Club Cultures |
Website | www |
Sarah L. Thornton (born 1965) is a writer, ethnographer and sociologist of culture. [1] Thornton has authored three books and many articles about artists, the art market, technology and design, the history of music technology, dance clubs, raves, cultural hierarchies, subcultures, [2] and ethnographic research methods.
Thornton was born in Canada. She lived in London, England, for 25 years. She now resides in San Francisco, California. Thornton is currently a scholar-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley. [3]
Her education comprises a BA in the History of Art from Concordia University, Montreal, and a PhD in the Sociology of Culture from Strathclyde University, Glasgow. [4]
Her academic posts have included a full-time lecturership at the University of Sussex, and a period as Visiting Research Fellow [5] at Goldsmiths, University of London.
She worked as a brand planner in a London advertising agency. [6] She was the chief writer about contemporary art for The Economist . [7] She has also written for publications including The Sunday Times Magazine , [8] The Art Newspaper , [9] Artforum.com, [10] The New Yorker , [11] The Telegraph , [12] The Guardian , [13] and The New Statesman . [14]
In Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital (1995), Thornton examines the shift from live to recorded music for public dancing (from record shops to raves) and the resistance to recording technology's enculturation of the "authentic," valued cultural form. The book also analyzes the dynamics of "hipness," critiquing Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital with her own formulation of "subcultural capital." The study responds to earlier works such as Dick Hebdige's 1979 book Subculture: The Meaning of Style. It does not see media as a reflection of social groups, but as integral to their formation. [15]
Contrary to youth subcultural ideologies, "subcultures" do not germinate from a seed and grow by force of their own energy into mysterious ‘movements’ only to be belatedly digested by the media. Rather, media and other culture industries are there and effective right from the start. They are central to the process of subcultural formation. [15]
The book is described by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson as "theoretically innovative" and "conceptually adventurous". [16]
The New York Times' Karen Rosenberg said that Seven Days in the Art World (2008) "was reported and written in a heated market, but it is poised to endure as a work of sociology...[Thornton] pushes her well-chosen subjects to explore the questions ‘What is an artist?’ and ‘What makes a work of art great?’" [17]
In the UK, Ben Lewis wrote in The Sunday Times that Seven Days was "a Robert Altmanesque panorama of...the most important cultural phenomenon of the last ten years". [18] While Peter Aspden argued in the Financial Times that "[Thornton] does well to resist the temptation to draw any glib, overarching conclusions. There is more than enough in her rigorous, precise reportage… for the reader to make his or her own connections." [19]
András Szántó reviewed Seven Days in the Art World: "Underneath [the book's] glossy surface lurks a sociologist's concern for institutional narratives as well as the ethnographer's conviction that entire social structures can be apprehended in seemingly frivolous patterns of speech or dress." [20]
Thornton's book 33 Artists in 3 Acts (2014) looks at the lives and work of figures "from all over the art ecosystem, from the market-driven mogul (Jeff Koons) to the profoundly intellectual performance artist (UCLA professor Andrea Fraser) to the impish prankster (Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan.)" [21] The central question guiding the book is: What defines an artist in the 21st century? Thornton received "a range of answers that will startle even art-world insiders." [22] Jackie Wullshlager of the Financial Times opined that Thornton is "skillfully nuanced" and "elevates gossip to sociology, writing with verve, insight and authenticity." [23]
33 Artists in 3 Acts received praise for its academic approach and "attention to detail and illustration of subtleties that bring her interviewees to life.... [Thornton's] flair for creating clear structures offer readers manageable points of access... without ever compromising on quality or content, or sounding pretentious." [24]
At The Economist, Thornton penned investigative and analytical articles about the inner workings of the contemporary art market. Topics included the value of art, the role of museum validation and branding, and the impact of gender on auction prices. [25] [26] [27] [28] In 2010, she wrote an article about the Damien Hirst auction, "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever", which took place on the evening that Lehman Brothers went bankrupt in 2008. The article explained how the auction was so successful. [29]
Thornton's later articles have focused on the tech world of Silicon Valley. For Cultured Magazine, she has published profiles of tech leaders including Mike Krieger (Instagram co-founder), [30] Evan Williams (Twitter co-founder), [31] and Ivy Ross (Head of Design for Google Hardware). [32]
On 26 July 2011, Thornton won a historic libel and malicious falsehood victory against Lynn Barber and The Daily Telegraph. [33] All three of the Telegraph′s attempts to appeal were denied. [34]
Goth is a music-based subculture that began in the United Kingdom during the early 1980s. It was developed by fans of Gothic rock, an offshoot of the post-punk music genre. The name Goth was derived directly from the genre. Notable post-punk artists who presaged the gothic rock genre and helped develop and shape the subculture include: Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, the Cure, and Joy Division.
A subculture is a group of people within a culture that differentiates itself from the parent culture to which it belongs, often maintaining some of its founding principles. Subcultures develop their own norms and values regarding cultural, political, and sexual matters. Subcultures are part of society while keeping their specific characteristics intact. Examples of subcultures include BDSM, hippies, goths, bikers, punks, skinheads, hip-hoppers, metalheads, and cosplayers. The concept of subcultures was developed in sociology and cultural studies. Subcultures differ from countercultures.
Damien Steven Hirst is an English artist, entrepreneur, and art collector. He is one of the Young British Artists (YBAs) who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s. He is reportedly the United Kingdom's richest living artist, with his wealth estimated at US$384 million in the 2020 Sunday Times Rich List. During the 1990s his career was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi, but increasing frictions came to a head in 2003 and the relationship ended.
Charles Saatchi is an Iraqi-British businessman and the co-founder, with his brother Maurice, of advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi. The brothers led the business – the world's largest advertising agency in the 1980s – until they were forced out in 1995. In the same year, the brothers formed a new agency called M&C Saatchi.
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Dick Hebdige is an expatriate English media theorist and sociologist, and a professor of art and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His work is commonly associated with the study of subcultures, and its resistance against the mainstream of society. His current research interests include media topographies, desert studies, and performative criticism.
Since its founding in 1843, the editorial stance of The Economist has been developed to further its founding purpose to "take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress". First published by Scottish economist James Wilson to muster support for abolishing the British Corn Laws (1815–1846), a system of import tariffs, the weekly has made free trade a touchstone of their editorial stance. Its core stance has been summarized by The Guardian as a "trusted three-card trick of privatisation, deregulation and liberalisation".
James Johnston is an English alternative rock musician and painter.
John Kampfner is a British author, broadcaster and commentator. He is now an Executive Director at Chatham House, leading its UK in the World initiative. His sixth book Why The Germans Do It Better, Notes From A Grown-Up Country, was published in 2020 and chosen as one of the books of the year in 2020 and 2021 in a number of newspapers. He is currently working on a new book about Berlin.
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The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living is an artwork created in 1991 by Damien Hirst, an English artist and a leading member of the "Young British Artists". It consists of a preserved tiger shark submerged in formaldehyde in a glass-panel display case. It was originally commissioned in 1991 by Charles Saatchi, who sold it in 2004 to Steven A. Cohen for an undisclosed amount, widely reported to have been at least $8 million. However, the title of Don Thompson's book, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art, suggests a higher figure.
For the Love of God is a sculpture by artist Damien Hirst produced in 2007. It consists of a platinum cast of an 18th-century human skull encrusted with 8,601 flawless diamonds, including a pear-shaped pink diamond located in the forehead that is known as the Skull Star Diamond. The skull's teeth are original, and were purchased by Hirst in London. The artwork is a memento mori, or reminder of the mortality of the viewer.
Jeffrey Lynn Koons is an American artist recognized for his work dealing with popular culture and his sculptures depicting everyday objects, including balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror-finish surfaces. He lives and works in both New York City and his hometown of York, Pennsylvania. His works have sold for substantial sums, including at least two record auction prices for a work by a living artist: US$58.4 million for Balloon Dog (Orange) in 2013 and US$91.1 million for Rabbit in 2019.
The Global Livability Ranking is a yearly assessment published by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), ranking 172 global cities for their urban quality of life based on assessments of stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education and infrastructure. Austria's capital, Vienna, was ranked the most liveable city in 2022 among the 172 cities surveyed by The Economist Intelligence Unit, having previously won in 2018 and 2019. Auckland was ranked the most liveable city in 2021. Melbourne, Australia, had been ranked by the EIU as the world's most liveable city for seven years in a row, from 2011 to 2017.
The Secret Lives of Colour is a 2016 non-fiction book by British writer Kassia St. Clair which explores the cultural and social history of colours. The book, which is based on a column St. Clair writes for British magazine Elle Decoration, is organized in a series of chapters by color, arranged from white to black. Each chapter is composed of short, two to four page, essays on different shades of its respective color, discussing an interesting aspect of science, history, art, or culture relating to the shade. There are a total of 75 essays in the book. Each page is bordered by a stripe of the color it discusses for easy visual identification, even when the book is closed.
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Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco is an American contemporary art museum that opened in October 2022, and is located in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco, California. Admission is free.
Seven Days in the Art World. By Sarah Thornton. Norton; 287 pages; $15.95. Granta; £8.99 How artists become collectable and who rules the art world, by our chief writer on contemporary art.
His pickled sharks and pill cabinets made him rich and famous. Now he's shelved them and reinvented himself as a serious painter. And it seems Damien Hirst has struck oil all over again.
Making sense of spots, sharks, pills, fish and butterflies.
The national obsession with the Turner Prize.
Art sales have been inflated by super-rich collectors who didn't know what to do with their money.