WASHINGTON — Sarah Thornton is in a Hirshhorn gallery, lingering beneath a piece by the Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto. It’s a massive, bulbous, inexplicably sexual thing that droops down from the ceiling and fills the whole space.
“Does it still smell?” Thornton wants to know.
A young staff member looks confused. It doesn’t. It never did, he says.
Thornton might be forgiven for her faux pas. For the past several years, the sociologist and best-selling author — a breezy presence in a stylishly skinny black pantsuit and comically towering Stella McCartney platforms — has been nosing around the prop drawers of conceptual photographer Cindy Sherman and crunching around on Chinese contemporary art star Ai Weiwei’s “Sunflower Seeds.” She has been talked to death by Jeff Koons. And she has sniffed her fair share of Netos.
Neto, Thornton explains, often fills his saggy sculptures with spices such as turmeric, cumin and cloves.
The Hirshhorn’s is more like an innocuous bean bag, filled with tiny foam pellets, and Thornton, though she has written two books about contemporary art, has never seen one quite like it.
Perhaps that’s why she breaks the cardinal rule of the museum world — never touch the art — and stretches out her hand to inspect the piece more closely, sending several nervous staff members lunging in her direction.
At 49, Thornton is the Jane Goodall of the art world. An academic, she has probed and prodded her way to one of the best views of the high-stakes international art market, and into the studios of the occasionally ego-driven, market-conscious artists whose works regularly fetch upward of $50 million apiece.
It’s an exclusive, insular world, but Thornton’s first book about art, 2008’s “Seven Days in the Art World,” was pure populism, a dishy, behind-the-scenes read about heady auctions at Christie’s, the cutthroat atmosphere of art fairs, and much more. It became an unexpected bestseller and landed the writer in art’s inner circle.
Last week, Thornton was poking around the Hirshhorn in the hours before she would be the guest of honor at a discussion of her new book, “33 Artists in 3 Acts,” which chronicles her nearly five-year quest to understand what makes artists tick.
Thornton has the ability to “seduce people to expose themselves,” the artist Andrea Fraser recently told an audience at New York’s New Museum.
Fraser and others opened their doors to Thornton as she traversed the globe to interview and observe artists in their own world. The author watches as Maurizio Cattelan prepares for what he called his retirement retrospective at New York’s Guggenheim in 2011. She is with eccentric Japanese pop artist Yayoi Kusama on the eve of her phenomenal 2012 comeback, when she landed a retrospective at the Whitney and a complementary Louis Vuitton line. And Thornton spends time in the studios of photographer Laurie Simmons and her husband, painter Carroll Dunham, just before their daughter, Lena, lands a deal with HBO.
This is one of Thornton’s greatest knacks: She tends to arrive on artists’ doorsteps just before some seismic shift in their public profiles. But her other talent is gaining access, penetrating artists’ private spheres as both an art-world insider and an academically minded outsider.
Not that they all say yes. “Oftentimes, an artist won’t want to see me, but then they give in,” Thornton says with a chuckle. Sherman was one who at first rebuffed her, says Thornton, and then became “incredibly generous” with her time.
“She was kind of a ghost,” Mika Yoshitake recalls of her first brush with Thornton in 2007, when the writer was researching “Seven Days.” Thornton had traveled to Japan to witness the manic experience of putting together Takashi Murakami’shuge exhibition for Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Yoshitake, now an assistant curator at the Hirshhorn, was working with the museum on the retrospective, and she recalls Thornton as an almost entirely silent observer.
Ask how it feels to have been the subject of Thornton’s occasionally cutting gaze, and you can almost hear a slight shudder in Yoshitake’s voice.
“It was kind of amusing,” she says with a laugh. When tensions between the museum and the artist nearly came to a head over the placement of a garish 19-foot, platinum-covered Buddha, Yoshitake recalls, “I was so in it, I don’t remember what happened. But (Thornton) — kind of blow-by-blow — was able to explain it, and it was so fascinating.”
It helps to remain on the periphery. Thornton has long lived far from the art hotbeds, residing for the past 20 years mostly in London, which has what she describes as a fairly “creaky” art scene.
Yet it’s clear, as she flits across the Hirshhorn murmuring her thoughts on each piece, from the Andy Warhol to the Bruce Nauman, that the art world is as much her place as it is the artists’.
In one scene in “Seven Days,” a Sotheby’s employee tells Thornton, “We don’t deal with artists, just the work, and it’s a good thing, too.”
Was this some kind of warning, that artists’ egos and personalities would be hard to capture in her new book?
“I don’t think artists are any more difficult to interview than dealers,” Thornton replies. “In fact, dealers are more difficult. They’re more likely to give you PR than artists are.
“The good thing about artists,” she adds, “is they have a belief in the truth.”
