Boogie Woogie - Hardcover

Moynihan, Danny

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0715630229 ISBN 13: 9780715630228

Publisher: Duck Editions, 2000

Synopsis

Casting a wry and satirical eye over New York's modern art world, this novel paints a subversive picture of the loves and lives of artists, dealers and wannabees in New York's cut-throat art scene.

About this title

Review:

Danny Moynihan's Boogie-Woogie is the first novel that the New York art world has deserved for some time. As a curator and artist who has worked extensively in both New York and London, Moynihan has had ample opportunity to observe the bitchy, hysterical, pretentious and money-driven art world that he recreates with often hilarious results in Boogie-Woogie.

The book's title comes from Piet Mondrian's famous painting Broadway Boogie-Woogie, an iconic image of abstract expressionism painted in New York in the 1940s. Alfred and Alfreda Rheingold are the proud but eccentric owners of one of Mondrian's last Boogie-Woogie paintings. In sweaty pursuit of the Mondrian is the reptilian, golf-loving art dealer Art Spindle, who prides himself on once having "managed to sell a Picasso atercolour on the 11th green". What unfolds in the manic attempt to land the Mondrian is a dizzying montage of the great and the not so good of New York's art world. Its neurotic, self-seeking cast list includes the predatory tattooed lesbian video-artist Elaine, the vain but failed artist Jo Richard with a penchant for anal sex, and the lecherous stammering collector Bob Macclestone with his "ah, Brancusi, ah, in the, ah, hallway".

Moynihan paints a satirical and often hilarious portrait of the openings, closings and bad repartee of an art world where as one of Spindle's clients tells him, "That's business, Art". Told in the style of Robert Altman's filmShort Cuts and reminiscent of Altman's own send-up of Hollywood life The Player, Boogie-Woogie does at times become too clever for its own good, and the hollowness of its entire cast grates towards the end. Nevertheless, it is a very funny and wry view of an art world gone mad.--Jerry Brotton

Review:

"'brilliant...so clever and absolutely filthy' - Jilly Cooper; '...spectacular stuff: a frothy yet dark fiction...It's fast, snappy, funny and sick...the writing is as clean and sick as Hirst's medicine chests, but never dull' - Harriet Lane, The Observer; 'an excellent first novel' - Georgia Metcalfe, Daily Mail; 'clever, competent and cool' - Jessica Mann, Sunday Telegraph"

About this edition

• Publisher: Duck Editions
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0715630229
• ISBN 13: 9780715630228
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 254