Art World Confidential.(Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World)

Byline: LESLIE CAMHI editor: Valerie Steiker

A renowned sociologist goes native, writes Leslie Camhi.

Am I the only art-world insider whom sociologist Sarah Thornton neglected to consult for her wildly informative and entertaining new book, Seven Days in the Art World (W. W. Norton)? During five years of research, Thornton conducted 250 interviews with artists and auction-house experts, curators and collectors, critics, dealers, graduate students, educators, and others. The result: a continent-hopping tour taking readers through seven days in six cities--a November evening sale at Christie's; an epic-length Cal Arts crit; a visit to a hugely commercial artist's studio, et cetera--and illuminating the art world's power centers as never before.

"The book is very much about everything but the art," Thornton says over drinks in the Jardin du Palais Royal while in Paris to lunch with the book's French publisher. (German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Korean editions are also in the works.) Lithe and chic in a gray-and-white striped Paul Smith jacket, wide-leg white Armani pants, and gilded Prada platform sandals (toenails: platinum), she projects, at 43, an uncanny youthfulness and vitality. When she began research, she found many in the art world resistant to sociology's charms. "There's this core belief that nothing is more important than the art itself," she continues. "I don't disagree with that. But that doesn't mean the other stuff isn't worth writing about, too."

In Seven Days, out next month, Thornton's razor-sharp observations of obscure protocols and quasi-ecclesiastical hierarchies are profoundly demystifying. There's the auction houses' definition of a "good Basquiat," for example: made in 1982 or 1983 and containing "a head, a crown, and the color red." There's the answer a hard-core 70-something collector offers when asked what period of art he collects: "This morning." She's alert to every nuance of value, from sculptor and Turner Prize nominee Rebecca Warren's green leather boots (which seemed "one pair in a considerable collection of trophy footwear") to the pecking order of the ads placed in Artforum and the moaning of a ...