In the nineteenth century, the French Academy of Fine Arts held a virtual monopoly on the presentation of new art to the Parisian public. Official sanction through the Academy's annual Salon exhibition was a requirement for any artist wanting to build a reputation. The Academy's stranglehold was broken in the 1870s by a group of Impressionists who instituted a series of independent shows of their paintings. As a result, a competitive market for art began to emerge which allowed artists the freedom to experiment with innovative ideas. In due course a demand for this new art developed, fuelled particularly by smart investors who recognized that shrewd purchases could lead to significant financial gain. These momentous events from nineteenth-century Paris form the backstory to David Galenson's book, which charts the history of art from 1900 to the present. He sees these events as creating the market conditions that spread through the art world and enabled the continuing flow of innovation which characterized the progress of art throughout the twentieth century.

In the book's opening chapters, Galenson identifies the greatest artists, the most important works, and the most significant breakthroughs. He goes on to look more deeply at what artists did and how they did it—their exploration of new genres, their interest in telling stories of their own lives, their role as tricksters, and their use of language. Drawing heavily on the literature of art history, these chapters are liberally studded with quotes from artists and critics, all painstakingly referenced in the best scholarly tradition. Altogether they comprise about three-quarters of the book, and it is only when the reader reaches the final three chapters—dealing with globalization, the art market, and current and future prospects—that anything resembling an economic argument is proposed. Indeed the author's entire thesis rests not so much on his initial proposition about markets as it does on his views about the nature of creativity.

In discussing the creative process, Galenson draws what he sees as a fundamental distinction between experimental and conceptual artists. The former, he claims, are “motivated by aesthetic criteria; their goal is to present visual perceptions” (p. 10). They are gradualists, and their innovations appear over extended periods. Conceptual artists, on the other hand, are revolutionaries who “want to express ideas or emotions” (p. 11). Conceptual innovations appear suddenly in works that are different from anything that has gone before. This distinction runs like a leitmotiv through the book. On it is based not only the author's claim to have explained every shift in genre, style, or practice in art that has occurred over the period under review, but also his repeated assertion that art historians and scholars have failed to comprehend what they are looking at. So it is a proposition that has to bear a lot of weight. Yet there is a strong element of post hoc theorizing about it, with little analytical support for the causal connections the author puts forward as arising from it. Likewise, the other element in the book's argument—the importance of the competitive market in inducing innovation—is asserted rather than analyzed. Drawing attention to Andy Warhol or Damien Hirst as exemplars of a new interest in making money from art is no substitute for a more nuanced understanding of the balance between financial and artistic motivation in conditioning the objective functions of creative artists.

Galenson describes his methodology as a blend of qualitative and quantitative, the latter marking a point of difference from the approach of traditional art historians. But Galenson's quantification is restricted to counting; he adds up the number of mentions in a range of texts to compile lists of the twentieth century's 15 greatest artists, the eight most important works, the 49 new genres of art that arose in these years, the 20 artists who most often used words in their works, and so on and on. Such numerical exercises are always questionable—how comprehensive were the sources used? Why eight most important works and not 16 or 30, etc.? One of the problems inherent in compiling such lists is illustrated in the chapter on female artists, where Galenson commendably seeks to rectify the neglect of women practitioners in the history of art. Using the same counting methods, he lists the eight most important women artists of the twentieth century and in doing so invites the question as to why none of them appears in his earlier compilation of the 15 greatest artists. The answer is of course that the latter list inevitably reflects the inherent biases of the sources from which it is drawn.

Although this book purports to provide an economic explanation of trends in twentieth-century art, the level of economic analysis in it is rudimentary. Moreover, Galenson ignores the literature of economics in making his arguments. In his vast bibliography, there are virtually no economists, and in the chapter on artists and the market (chapter 15) there is no reference to the many economic studies that have been undertaken in recent years on the demand for art works, the determinants of art prices, or the role of pecuniary incentives in bringing forth innovative art. These are serious shortcomings. Nevertheless, the author's knowledge of art is so prodigious that at the very least the book can be recommended as a highly readable and finely detailed account of the development of art over the last century.