Lots more than money

Little Brown, #20

Sotheby's is an institution of abiding fascination, the most famous auction house in the world. Robert Lacey's book charts its history from its eight-eenth-century origins as a bookseller, through such landmark sales as the Goldschmidt auction of 1958, which invented the modern impressionist market, on to the hugely successful

dispersal in New York of the collection of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. It is a gripping narrative, and Lacey writes it with his usual readability: crises and triumphs are evoked with the immediacy and drama of a good thriller.

Here I should declare an interest. I am a director of Sotheby's. I also write thrillers set in the art world, so I am very aware of that world's rich seam of sensation and chicanery. I am aware, too, of the difficulty confronting any outsider - even one as experienced as Lacey - who tries to penetrate its mysteries. If he is to achieve a balanced understanding of what really goes on at Sotheby's he must avoid being seduced by the glamour and the money and the intrigue into assuming that this is all that an auction house amounts to.

I don't think that Lacey quite achieves that balance. As a journalist who has built a highly successful career specialising in the lifestyles of the rich and famous, it is easy to see what attracted him to the subject of Sotheby's. The auction house is a heady mix of art and money, flavoured with a generous dash of social aspiration. He is good on the money and the social aspiration, but less good on the art.

He is too eager to see it simply as the vehicle for acquisition of class by insecure new wealth. Yes, Sotheby's is frequently the playground of the rich. But there is another, equally significant dimension to its activities. It is an enormous repository of expertise, which services a large but less high-profile clientele (rich and not so rich) driven not by social ambition but by knowledge and love of works of art. This is the bedrock of Sotheby's success. It is a bedrock to which Lacey does not give enough emphasis.

He also takes an excessively cynical view of the auction process, which he describes as ''a fundamentally larcenous ritual, with buyers hoping to steal a bargain, while sellers hope to extort a ridiculous price. It is the auctioneer's job to glide between these two irreconcilable illusions, part confidant, part confidence trickster''. The truth is that works of art, being unique, are impossible to value definitively. Value, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder, so that a measure of fantasy always informs every price achieved by the hammer's fall. That fantasy is the allure of the art market, what makes it more sympathetic than, say, the stock market. The fantasy reconciles the irreconcilable, and frequently enables buyer and seller to be delighted simultaneously. It is an act of magic, not criminal deception.

One man who understood the magic better than anyone was Peter Wilson. The legendary chairman of Sotheby's from 1955 to 1979 is rightly credited not just with the revival of his own firm's fortunes but with the invention of the modern art market. Guileful, dynamic, charming, and ambitious, he was possessed of a brilliant and discerning eye; but his genius was flawed. His single-minded pursuit of business at all costs bred in his Sotheby's acolytes a culture that was cavalier about things like export licences.

Revelations about those times have prompted the company's current management to institute the rigid standards of scrupulousness in such matters that apply today. I can vouch for that. But Wilson emerges from Lacey's pages as the dominant character in a book rich in characters. One realises what a wonderful subject he would make for a perceptive full-scale biography.

Such a biography was not, of course, Lacey's brief. But he did set out with the original intention of writing a rather different book, a study of the rivalry between Sotheby's and Christie's. He was frustrated by Christie's unwillingness to co-operate in the project. This was a pity, as the theme has plenty of potential.

Staid old Christie's, the auction house of the English establishment, has never really understood Sotheby's, traditionally their more aggressive competitors. In the early 1980s two American financiers who owned a carpet company called General Felt were mounting a hostile takeover bid for Sotheby's. The story goes that Christie's watched developments with bemusement. ''Who is this General Felt?'' they demanded. ''We can't find him on the Army List.''

n Philip Hook's latest art world thriller, The Soldier in the Wheatfield, is published by Hodder and Stoughton on July 2.