The meteoric rise of the biggest unregulated financial marketplace in the world-for contemporary art-is driven with a few passionate, guileful, and incredibly hard-nosed dealers. They are able to make and break professions and fortunes. The contemporary art market can be an worldwide juggernaut, tossing off multimillion-dollar deals as wealthy customers move from fair to fair, auction to public sale, party to glittering party. But none of it would happen with no dealers-the tastemakers who back emerging artists and steer about Boom: Mad Money, Mega Sellers, and the Rise of Modern Art them to achievement, often to see them picked off with a rival. Sellers operate within a private world of handshake agreements, negotiating for the highest commissions. Michael Shnayerson, a longtime adding editor to Vanity Good, writes the initial ever definitive history of their actions. He has spoken to all or any of today’s so-called mega dealers-Larry Gagosian, David Zwirner, Arne and Marc Glimcher, and Iwan Wirth-along with a large number of additional dealers-from Irving Blum to Gavin Brown-who caused the greatest artists of their situations: Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, and more. This kaleidoscopic history starts in the middle-1940s in genteel poverty with a scattering of galleries in midtown Manhattan, requires us through the ramshackle 1950s studios of Coenties Slide, the hipster locations in SoHo and Chelsea, London’s Bond Street, and across the terraces of Art Basel until today. Today, dealers and auctioneers would like the first billion-dollar painting. It hasn’t occurred yet, however they are assured they can push the purchase price there soon.