Going Once: A Memoir of Art, Society, and Charity

More entertaining than an auction itself, this zesty memoir of one of Sotheby's chief auctioneers is full of intriguing revelations about the business, its clients and its competitors. Whether rummaging through the detritus and icons of the estates to be sold, dealing with customers, handling the gavel or vying for business, Woolley offers a wry view of the world of money, values, art and collecting. An expert in valuing Russian art, having been trained at the Fifth Avenue shop of A La Vieille Russie in Manhattan, he recounts his adventures here and abroad in acquiring, pricing and selling it. He muses on Andy Warhol's astonishing shopping habits and puzzling acquisitions, and the postmortem hunting and sorting of things stowed in paper bags, drawers or, as with valuable jewelry, tossed on top of Warhol's bed; and he marvels at the prices he enjoyed getting for them. He romps through Liberace's kitsch and discusses fashions in the art market, and why the Japanese have paid such exorbitant prices. His personal life is wide open: he enjoys being a ``walker'' for wealthy women, and he speaks frankly about the network of homosexuals in the art business, his own gay life and lovers, his AIDS infection and his charitable work for other victims who ``do not have the luxury of dying in the style to which I am accustomed.'' (Nov.)