I contribute to the editorial board of Documents of Contemporary Art, these are readers co-published by the Whitechapel Gallery and MIT press.

In recent decades artists have progresively expanded the boundaries of art, as they have sought to engage with an increasingly varied social, political and cultural environment. Likewise, being an artist, teaching, curating and/or interpreting art and visual culture is no longer the perogative of traditional disciplines, but consists of overlapping practices centered on significant ideas, topics and themes. Ranging from the Everyday to Beauty, the psychoanalytical to the political.

The Documents of Contemporary Arts series emerges from these contexts. Each volume -edited by a guest scholar, artist critic or curator - focuses on a specific subject or body of thought that has been a key influence on current international art. 

I just finished reading Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton. Thornton guides us through seven different days –constructed over a five year research period. Each day is a description of one of the institutional structures that comprise the market for contemporary art: a Christies auction, the famous art school ‘crit’ of Michael Asher, the Basel Art fair, the build-up to the Turner Prize, the offices of Artforum magazine, the corporate studio of Takashi Murakami and the Venice Biennale. A glaring omission is that one of the days was not spent at a contemporary art museum, or even a particular high-end gallery.

Despite the odd inclusion of Asher’s ‘crit’, and Thornton's insistance that "the art world is much broader than the art market," her mapping of an art world, revolves around the highly visible competitive market.