Hook offers up a dishy lexicon of art-world topics and terminology in this loosely structured dictionary. As painting specialist for Sotheby's auction house and a popular appraiser on Antiques Roadshow, Hook is fascinated by the relationship between art and money, and by the ways in which an artwork obtains its market value. Relying on 35 years of experience and anecdote, Hook divides his guide into sections that cover artists' backstories, artists' subjects, visual impact, provenance, and market variance. Each section contains a unique alphabet of pithy, bite-size essays, which lay bare outrageous episodes of art history and oddities of audience taste. Football, for example, charts auction sales against ballplayer salaries over time. Interiors reveals that Bonnard's bathrooms and Matisse's hotels are in demand, while no one wants paintings of churches. War (191418) cheerfully lists artists whose work would have fetched better prices if only they had perished earlier. With its tone of art-history-textbook-meets-tabloid, Hook's witty primer provides a truthful yet humorous crash course, an insider's take that is more gentle ribbing than art-world expos. (Booklist)
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