In Sarah Thornton’s book, “Seven Days in the Art World,” an avid collector, garbed in Missoni and a large vintage Cartier diamond ring, says, “It’s dangerous to wear Prada. You might get caught in the same outfit as three of Christie’s staff.”

Thornton, who flew to Manila for a whirlwind weekend involving a talk at Art Fair, perusing the works across the fair’s four floors and hanging out with Silverlens Gallery’s Isa Lorenzo and Rachel Rillo, is dressed in a color-blocked tee and black shorts, her look punctuated by a pair of glittering Marni platform sandals. And, ironically, a Prada purse from, pardon my faulty memory, what seemed to be the Spring-Summer 2013 collection.

“Clothing is really an important part of the art world,” she says. “It really is.”

That line about Prada is an inside joke about the Art World (capital A, capital W) and its obsession with status.

“If you’re an artist or a collector, I guess you don’t want to look like one of the auction house staff,” I say.

“Well, she was partly saying it humorously. She was kinda taking the piss out of herself,” Thornton says with a laugh. “She was a fashion snob. Good for her.”

Dubbed the “Jane Goodall of the art world” by the Washington Post, Thornton has put together a Robert Altman-esque portrait of the scene, thanks to her immersion in the art world, conducting hundreds of interviews with numerous art world stars such as Ai Wei Wei, Jeff Koons, Yayoi Kusama, Cindy Sherman, in the process of researching her books, namely “33 Artists in 3 Acts” and “Seven Days in the Art World.”

“I think the nuances around self-presentation and those kinds of environments fascinate me and are pretty detailed,” she says.

Familiar with the intricacies of that specific milieu and the hierarchies within, Thornton is aware of how fashion plays into the role of the artist and collector and dealer.

“I feel like the art world bleeds into the fashion world,” she says.

Excerpts from our Q&A

What would you say is more pretentious—the art world or the fashion world?

Oh, tough question. I would say a different kind of pretension.

So how would you classify art pretension versus fashion pretension?

They’re both very precious, there’s a lot of pretending in both. I’m sure the fashion world perceives the art world as more pretentious, and vice versa. The art world probably thinks the fashion world is shallow, compared to themselves, but the fashion world probably thinks there are more charlatans in the art world.

In the art world, you can find a lot of junky found objects and combine them in a sculpture and call it art and charge a fortune. And maybe there are some people in the fashion world who would see that as highly pretentious. But if you had to choose two worlds that deserved each other in terms of pretension, I would have to say that would be art and fashion. (laughs)
Exactly.

I love pretension. Pretension is funny, right? I mean, it’s amusing, it tells you a lot about human needs or status. And you know one of the things you’re not supposed to do is to talk about how an artist dresses. You’re never supposed to describe an artist’s wardrobe. You’re just supposed to have a conversation with them, talk about their work, don’t turn your eye out of the frame and look at their body—but I do that throughout both books and even more so in “33 Artists in 3 Acts.”

Artists are highly sensitive visual creatures; what they’re wearing is not an accident.

Isn’t what they wear possibly the purest representation of themselves versus the work? Would you say that the work is a statement sometimes of their outlook on the world and not of themselves? Whereas what they wear is a clearer representation of how they feel, or what they want to project?

I wouldn’t actually say that, because I think you would get a lot of inner self in your work and you get a lot of social self in the clothes. And often artists will have a uniform they’ll wear over and over again. Someone like Ai Wei Wei just wears his baggy cotton navy jacket, which is kinda like workman wear almost, and Yayoi Kusama is always wearing polka dots; part of the way she protects herself from this infinity that could gobble her up is through infinity nets, these nets that create holes which become spots. So I’ve never seen her not wearing spots or dots, usually in bright colors.

So they all have their kind of uniforms but, in a way, their work can be more expressive because it’s often more diverse.

I once had a funny conversation with an artist called Mary Kelly in Abu Dhabi. We were going to a reception in a sheikha’s house, one of the Abu Dhabi princesses. She was wearing a simple plain black dress. And she was talking about whether she was going to wear jewelry or not, but the joke was if she put on jewelry she would look like a collector, and if she didn’t, she’d look like an artist.

So there’s a certain monk-like aesthetic that artists sometimes adopt to make sure they’re known for the role they’re in and not mistaken for somebody else. I have seen artists do that a lot, especially in art fairs.
I remember in the ’70s, there’s an artist named Jeremy Deller; he was wearing socks inside Birkenstocks at the fair and he was pretending to be oblivious, and maybe he was oblivious at that moment, but he made a decision to dress that way at some point.

How would you differentiate their social self from their work self?

Their professional self is part and parcel of their social self. I think the pressure on the artist to perform in their particular way is much bigger than it is for people in other jobs. Because they have to be this inspiring origin of this whole body of work, and they bring this je ne sais quoi and that specialness to the world.
And that’s quite different from a lot of other professions. I think the onus on the artists’ identity is a bigger issue than it is in the fashion world. You can say that the brands are dependent on Marc Jacobs or Stella McCartney or those personalities, but they survive after the original designer’s dead. Chanel lives on.
This is not the case of the artist. When the artist dies, the oeuvre ends. And so that kind of corporate underpinning changes and, of course, you have artistic designers that change. Marc Jacobs was at Vuitton, he left, now we have Galliano. The brand survives with different artistic directors. You can never have that situation in the art world.

But do you think there comes a point when the artist becomes a brand? Their work survives after the artist’s passing since replicas of their work continue to be produced or because their work was used in fashion, so it can live beyond them.

Basically, the work stops when the artist dies. Andy Warhol may very well be a brand that you can print on T-shirts, but you can’t make any more paintings. And that’s the difference. But you can still have a Chanel jacket.

Do you think, with the way the art world functions now—everyone wants to be famous, everyone wants to make money—artists have to act like brands?

I think one of the features of being an international artist is that your name does became a brand of sorts. Artists who do well in the art market are brands for the most part. And you can argue that they’re the strongest brands in the world.

For example, when a Francis Bacon painting sells for a hundred million dollars, per square inch, that’s the strongest brand in the world. You can’t find anything else that sells for that kind of money in terms of size and material. You can copy it, with digital techniques, but that would be worth nothing.

So what do you think artists need to do to be successful now?

There’s no one recipe. Part of what makes the art world interesting is that the artist who comes up with a new way to be successful is a very interesting artist. And it’s not just about innovation in the work, but innovation in career management and the way they play their game.

And that’s what makes me interested, like with “33 Artists in 3 Acts,” it’s how they play the game in the art world. Because in a lot of ways, any industry has a lot of rules.

Hierarchy

In terms of hierarchy, who rules the art world—is it the collector or the artist?

That depends. Most artists don’t rule, but the most sought-after artist gains a lot of power. So collectors, dealers, artists, curators, auction house people, critics, all those in different roles—everybody does have their own hierarchy. A critic can never be more powerful than the most powerful artist or collector, but a critic can be more powerful than a lot of artists and a collectors. And there are some collectors in certain environments who can’t even buy what they want to buy.

Let’s say there’s an artist who doesn’t make much work and there’s a long queue of people wanting it and the dealer can pick and choose who gets it, and maybe that particular collector doesn’t go on top of the list. So there’s a kind of a hierarchy within each role, and they intersect in interesting ways. It’s not strictly a money hierarchy, which I find very interesting. The richest person doesn’t always have the most power.

So it’s a question of social cachet?

And cultural kudos. That goes a long way in the art world. Certain artists can be hugely revered, and they may not be wealthy and may make things that are hard to sell, but they have a lot of cultural power, a lot of influence.

And who would be on the lowest rung?

The writers. (Laughs) In general, if you had to choose a professional category, probably the writers. But I have a lot of power nowadays, having written about the art world for 15 years and published two books about it—but power in a very particular sense, I guess. Artists who haven’t gotten any recognition might see me as someone who can change their life, but I think they’re overestimating my power.

Do you think because of Instagram and social media, artists can circumvent critics and traditional media and make a name on their own?

The US election is an example of that. Trump didn’t have a single endorsement from a major newspaper in America. And he won the election. So if the president of the US can do that, I’m sure artists can, too.

I haven’t seen it happen yet, though. Interestingly. Maybe there are more gatekeepers, curators and dealers who are involved in the rise of an artist and maybe they’re still suspicious of social media. I certainly do know dealers who become acquainted with artists’ work through Instagram. Facebook and Twitter seem to be irrelevant, but Instagram is like the meeting place for the art world.