Guest Post by Anna Barrington
Anna Barrington is the author of THE SPECTACLE (2025). She has worked in galleries, museums, and auction houses in the art world for seven years. She received an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and a BA from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Originally from Atlanta, she grew up on Cape Cod and currently lives in the UK. For more, visit annabarrington.com.
The art world is a fascinating place to set any novel in. Artists have a fiery passion to create something spiritual and immortalizing, which I wanted to capture in my debut novel, The Spectacle. The art world’s flashy spending and pretentious displays are also ripe for satire and dissection, with the busy schedule of art fairs, cocktail parties and gallery openings providing an ideal location to explore the nervous tension between people as social animals and shy, awkward individuals. The climb to the top is a grueling one, demanding us as readers to consider the Faustian bargain and the integrity lost in the quest for power. The Spectacle plunges into that world with Rudolph, a charismatic and manipulative art dealer, who falls in love with a struggling painter named Ingrid. Unbeknownst to her, however, he’s drowning in debt, leading him on a frantic tailspin to make up the money.
I was intrigued by major financial scams of the 2010s, like Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, and after working in the art world for many years I began to realize how opaque its financial workings were, how easy to steal or lie in this Wild West. But the richest vein of the art world, for me, is its deep intellectual interest in history and theories to explain the universe and how we perceive it. Below, here are five novels exploring the darkness of the art world: from nasty collectors and Nazi looting, to tortured artists determined to create their life’s work.
Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand
Generation Loss haunted me long after I read it, with its strikingly beautiful descriptions of frozen Maine islands and Hand’s attention to their gritty working-class communities. Cass, the ne’er-do-well protagonist, was a famous punk photographer before losing herself to twenty years of alcoholism and mistakes. She goes out to Maine to interview Aphrodite, an even more legendary photographer who seems to have burned out with her lost 60s commune, but is soon distracted by disappearances linked to the decaying hippies. Hand has the eye of an artist and I found the passages about photography fascinating. Hand is also intensely aware of how art can pierce the veil between the unknown and the material world, leading Cass to dreadful places as she finds out just how far the commune’s guru is willing to go for spiritual apotheosis.
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Scrap by Calla Henkel
I whipped through this quick, biting thriller about an artist hired by a secretive billionaire housewife. Esther Ray makes handmade books ‘for grandmothers and poets’, lives in the North Carolina mountains with her girlfriend, and is reluctant to revisit her unpleasant past in New York. Wanting to repay her mortgage, she agrees when Naomi, a wealthy collector, approaches her to create a scrapbook project for her husband’s 60th birthday. As she starts work, though, Esther realizes that Naomi is planning an earth-shattering revelation – and then Naomi dies. Obsessed with true crime, Esther races to discover the truth. The author, a multidisciplinary artist herself, describes her books as ‘airport novels’, but your average airport novel has nowhere near Henkel’s zingy wit or cutting-edge observations on the art world. It’s refreshing to read about the inner life of a protagonist so unapologetically herself, making this jaw-dropping plot feel believable, barely.
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The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
Donna Tartt’s lyrical third novel is a must for anyone searching for a literary deep-dive into Old Masters. Though The Goldfinch isn’t situated in the contemporary art world, its characters are saturated in a kind of glowing, russet-tinted Victorian interpretation of modernity in which people make rarefied cultural jokes and go regularly to the theater. Theo is a young boy whose mother dies when the Met is bombed in New York. In the chaos, Theo smuggles out a beautiful painting – The Goldfinch, by Carel Fabritius – which represents his only point of stability as his life is tipped upside down, moving from wealthy family friends to a deadbeat dad in Las Vegas. Though it’s frustrating to wait ten years for another Donna Tartt novel, the proof is in the pudding. Every character is compelling, every philosophical quandary has been richly considered, and we exit feeling that a great book, like the art Tartt meditates upon, rescues us from ‘the ungainly sadness of creatures pushing and struggling to live. ’
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Woman on Fire by Lisa Barr
This entertaining thriller immerses us in the minds of several characters – a sincere young journalist named Jules, the CEO of a luxury shoemaker, and an art thief. Each has their own reasons to pursue the truth behind the Nazi theft of a priceless painting in 1941. The painting, Woman on Fire, has been shrouded in secrecy for seventy years, though it depicts the shoemaker’s mother and passed through the art thief’s ancestral French gallery. Barr gives us well-realized characters with emotional stakes in this steamy beach read, contrasting Jules with the psychopathic art thief, Margaux de Laurent.
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The Painter by Peter Heller
This poetic novel is about Jim, a man’s man and a painter who isolates himself in the wilderness. He is prone to rage, which leads him to shoot the guy who cracks a joke about his daughter, now dead of a drug-deal stabbing. In certain ways the book feels like a follow-up to the tortured masculinity of Hemingway: men trying their best to suppress their trauma in the modern world. In other ways he feels like a Clint Eastwood character, gripped by sudden violences. But it is full of heart. Jim is a soulful creature at his best in worshipping the rivers, mountains, and wild animals around him, and his thoughts on painting and literature infuse the novel with a touching angst.
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The Spectacle by Anna Barrington
Rudolph Sullivan has made a name for himself in New York’s opulent art scene using his dazzling persona. But behind this persona lies secrets and debts that he must outrun to maintain his foothold in the art world. When struggling artist and gallery assistant Ingrid is lured in by his lavish lifestyle, Rudolph crafts a nefarious scheme to subdue his adversaries with her at the center.
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