The art world has always been ripe for satire. Remember Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word? The gap between what gets said about contemporary art and what most people actually think when they encounter it is wide enough to drive several comic novels through, and Alex Murray, a retired architect who spent decades visiting galleries on weekends while quietly asking himself whether he was a philistine or the artists were charlatans, has finally decided to find out.
The premise of the book is enjoyably crowded. Three middle-aged would-be collectors who meet three young East End artists busy launching a new movement, “Metaconceptualism”, the kind of word that arrives already self-satirising, and a Mayfair gallery is attempting a blockbuster comeback. These trajectories collide with escalating absurdity that comic fiction does well, eventually bringing the world, improbably? to the brink of World War III. Art doesn’t usually get that kind of credit for its geopolitical influence, but here we are.
‘Contemporary art’s absurdities cry out for satirisation, hence my choice of farce, for which the art world generously provides copious amounts of raw material.’ – Alex Murray
Murray was born in Malta, grew up in Durban, and trained at the Architectural Association in London. He spent his career as a chartered architect. He is not, in other words, an art-world insider, and that distance is both the book’s limitation and its greatest asset. The satire here is the satire of the genuinely baffled outsider who suspects the whole thing might be an elaborate confidence trick and has decided to test the hypothesis through fiction. There’s an honesty to that position that a more knowing insider account would lack.
None of this is new. The art market will put a price on anything if the right people fall in line. Take, for example, Maurizio Cattelan’s ‘Comedian’, which consisted of a gaffer-taped banana on a wall. It initially sold in an edition of three for between $120,000 and $150,000; one version was later auctioned at Sotheby’s in November 2024 for $6.2 million. The gap between what gets said about a work and what anyone actually feels standing in front of it is wide. Murray knows this territory and so, probably, does his reader.
What stops this tipping into a rant is that Murray isn’t angry. He’s genuinely confused, which is both funnier and more sympathetic. His characters don’t have agendas. They have good intentions and no idea what they’ve walked into, and, honestly, it accurately describes most people’s relationship to the contemporary art world.
The question Murray has been sitting with for decades, philistine or charlatan, doesn’t get definitively answered. It probably can’t be. But the attempt is entertaining. – PCR 04/2026
Modern Art for the Modern Home by Alex Murray is available Here
