The thing about Hollywood, as William Goldman famously wrote, is that "Nobody knows anything", and the same nugget of insight could be applied verbatim to a large slice of the contemporary art world. Nobody knows anything but everybody behaves as if they know everything, which has given rise to a strange, post-Duchampian, jargon-ridden realm where the goalposts have been moved so often that even the players cannot quite remember what the game is.
This state of affairs, as exemplified in the New York art scene of the 1990s, is observed with biting humour, but also with considerable affection, by Danny Moynihan in his satirical novel. His title comes from Piet Mondrian's painting Broadway Boogie- Woogie, and the book is an elaborately choreographed dance to the music of modern art. The convoluted narrative revolves around two main strands: a ramshackle attempt to persuade an ageing collector to part with a late Mondrian for a fraction of its market value, and a bid by an art world acolyte to open her own cutting-edge gallery. A sizeable but adroitly managed cast of artists, collectors, gallerists, curators and sundry others, variously eccentric, venal, ambitious, predatory, gullible and libidinous, waltz in and out of each other's lives, all driven in some way by that fugitive, ephemeral thing called art.
There are cameos from real-life characters, such as London's trendiest dealer, Jay Jopling of The White Cube Gallery, who, in one of the novel's funniest exchanges, manages to sell a client a steel ruler for $59,000 over the phone, on the basis that "it shows, in a wonderfully simple way, how we measure our lives by certain events and yet fail to recognise the finite".
Moynihan has an eye for the lurid and the recondite and laces his tale with surreal twists, in-jokes, a veritable A-Z of sexual practices - and a couple of really nasty moments. He is perhaps over-reliant on frenetic cross-cutting as a means of generating momentum, but he has written an extremely entertaining book that is more revealing of the human side of the contemporary art world than a barrowful of scholarly texts.
Aidan Dunne is Art Critic of The Irish Times
