The Devil in the Gallery: How Scandal, Shock, and Rivalry Shaped the Art World

"It’s an in-depth look at varied time periods and artists, which readers interested in gossip, drama, or art history will enjoy." Library Journal, Starred Review
Scandal, shock and rivalry all have negative connotations, don’t they? They can be catastrophic to businesses and individual careers. A whiff of scandal can turn a politician into a smoking ruin.
But these potentially disastrous “negatives” can and have spurred the world of fine art to new heights. A look at the history of art tells us that rivalries have, in fact, not only benefited the course of art, from ancient times to the present, but have also helped shape our narrative of art, lending it a sense of drama that it might otherwise lack, and therefore drawing the interest of a public who might not be drawn to the objects alone. There would be no Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo had rival Raphael not tricked the pope into assigning him the commission, certain that Michelangelo, who had never before worked with frescoes, would botch the job and become a laughing stock.
Scandal and shock have proven to be powerful weapons when harnessed and wielded willfully and well. That scandal is good for exposure has been so obviously the case that many artists have courted it intentionally, which we will define as shock: intentionally overturning expectations of the majority in a way that traditionalist find dismaying or upsetting, but which a certain minority avant-garde find exciting. From Damien Hirst presenting the public with a shark embalmed in formaldehyde and entombed in a glass case to Marcel Duchamp trying to convince the art community that a urinal is a great sculpture shock has been a key promotional tool.
The Devil in the Gallery is a guided tour of the history of art through it scandals, rivalries, and shocking acts, each of which resulted in a positive step forward for art in general and, in most cases, for the careers of the artists in question. In addition to telling dozens of stories, lavishly illustrated in full color, of such dramatic moments and arguing how they not only affected the history of art but affected it for the better, we will also examine the proactive role of the recipients of these intentionally dramatic actions: The art historians, the critics and even you, the general public.
The Devil likes to lurk in dark corners of the art world, morphing into many forms.
Let us shed light upon him.

Noah Charney is an art historian by training and is the founding director of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art (ARCA), a non-profit think tank and consultancy group on art crime prevention and solution. He has been written about internationally, including feature articles in the New York Times Magazine, Italy's Ventiquattro, Time Magazine, and has made appearances on National Public Radio, MSNBC, CNBC and ITV television, and many other news outlets. His novel, The Art Thief, was published in 2007 and has sold in sixteen other languages to date.


Dr. Noah Charney is the internationally best-selling author of more than a dozen books, translated into fourteen languages, including The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art, which was nominated for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and Museum of Lost Art, which was the finalist for the 2018 Digital Book World Award. He is a professor of art history specializing in art crime, and has taught for Yale University, Brown University, American University of Rome and University of Ljubljana. He is founder of ARCA, the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, a ground-breaking research group (www.artcrimeresearch.org) and teaches on their annual summer-long Postgraduate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection. He has written for dozens of major magazines and newspapers, including The Guardian, the Washington Post, the Observer and The Art Newspaper. His recent books on art include The Devil in the Gallery: How Scandal, Shock and Rivalry Shaped the Art World, Making It: The Artist's Survival Guide, The 12-Hour Art Expert: Everything You Need to Know About Art in a Dozen Masterpieces, and Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art, several of which were Amazon #1 best-sellers in their category. He also published the critically-acclaimed The Slavic Myths (Thames & Hudson) in the fall of 2023 and The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: The Complete Story of the World's Most Famous Artwork (Rowman & Littlefield, February 2024), which was praised in The New York Times Book Review and The Telegraph among others. He recently fronted an influencer campaign for Samsung, in 2022 he presented a BBC Radio 4 documentary, China's Stolen Treaures, his TED Ed videos (some on art crime) have been viewed by millions each, and he featured in a recent Amazon Prime documentary, The Picasso of Thieves. A course of his, “Lost Art,” featured this summer for The Teaching Company's Great Courses/Wondrium, the first of several that are scheduled, and he teaches online courses for Atlas Obscura, the Smithsonian, the National Gallery UK, and Yale University on art theft and forgery. He lives in Slovenia with his wife, children and their hairless dog, Hubert van Eyck (believe it or not). Learn more at www.noahcharney.com