The Golden Calves - Hardcover

Auchincloss, Louis

3.21

24 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395476917 ISBN 13: 9780395476918

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1988

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The New York art world provides the setting for public and private ranges of commitment and greed, idealism and venality, selfishness and yearning, and dedication and ambition

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From Publishers Weekly:

In his 40th book, Auchincloss continues the fictional chronicles of the New York elitist establishment and their insidiously controlling power plays. This time the art world is the locale. In a small but distinguished museum on Central Park West, battle lines are arranged, pitting a brash young curator, imbued with a craving for personal grandeur and a lust for the directorship of the museum, against colleagues whose main concern is the integrity of the collections they guard. In order to pin down the collection of an aged patrician benefactor, Miss Evelyn Speddon, opportunist Mark Addams even agrees to marry her companion, a young woman who works in the museum and who is dedicated to the preservation of the Speddon collection. Predictably, on the death of Miss Speddon, the museum president disregards her will, begins to deaccession items and embarks on a strategy that will aggrandize his reputation as an innovative developer and builder. Although sex plays a pivotal role in the byzantine relationships of curators and collectors, Auchincloss is not as successful in portraying credible liaisons as he is in making real the ways in which art is big business. Auchincloss, who is president of the Museum of the City of New York, is a deft guide through a closed-in world.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Auchincloss examines the moral ambiguities involved in mixing art and commerce in this mildly entertaining satire. A wealthy art collector, trying to match up her young protegee with the ambitious museum director, has been persuaded to grant the Museum of North America some freedom over her collection's disposition. Upon her death, love, revenge, and respect for great art all enter into the battle among rival factions. While the dialogue is brightly written, there could have been more descriptive detail. Oddly colorless for a novel dealing with the visual arts. Laurie Spector Sullivan, Transportation Authority Archives, Boston
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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