Sotheby's CEO and six-million dollar man Bill Ruprecht probably doesn’t read the leftist intellectual journal n+1. If he did, he probably wouldn’t be amused.

Discreetly nestled in the “Reviews” section of the current issue, behind James Franco’s uninhibited interdisciplinary bragathon and a discursive review of Chris Kraus’s new book (which seemingly argues that American Apparel stores are installation art), is Brookyln-based writer Alice Gregory’s Sotheby's exposé, “On the Market.” Equal parts “Devil Wears Prada”-style takedown and ethnographic study, Gregory’s story details her experience working at the auction house shortly after graduating from Bard. Like most dispossessed liberal arts school grads who hang around New York with a hazy memory of Derrida and without any real prospects, Gregory was spending the summer of 2009 pinching pennies and reading novels in McCarren Park until a friend hooked her up with a researcher position at Sotheby’s. Gregory’s “review” of the institution is pretty exhaustive, covering Sothebian shenanigans from Damien Hirst’s record-breaking art dump that sent the artist and the auctioneer skipping hand and hand to the bank on September 5, 2008 (the same day the Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy) to the ongoing lockout of its art handlers.

While the auction house doesn’t come out looking too shiny at the end of her piece, Gregory's tone is more reflective than muckraking. She conveys the feelings (or, better, wide gamut of feelings: from muffled outrage to alienated powerlessness) of working in an institution that — both fairly and unfairly — has become a symbol of cooperate greed, fat cat-ism, and “let them eat cake” entitlement. Read below for ARTINFO’s digest of (allegedly) true stories from an accidental “Sotheby’s girl.”

1: SOTHEBY'S IS LIKE MIDDLE SCHOOL 

“It was obvious from my very first day that Sotheby’s would be exactly as I had come to imagine it,” Gregory writes. According to her account, an auction house is the art world equivalent of the 11th grade: indelibly sexist, governed by invisible yet deeply entrenched power structures, and populated with stock characters. There are the “tweedy men” in Rare Books, the “preppies at Impressionism,” the “former sorority pledges at HR,” and the ever-elusive, unflappable “Cool Girls” at Contemporary. Decked out in “jewel-tone flats and blended eye-makeup,” Contemporary Girls are creatures of beauty, but also privilege: “These girls seemed immune to New York’s damning seasons, which always threaten to expose one’s tax bracket, especially if it’s low. The summer didn’t melt their makeup; the winter didn’t mar their manes. They were driven in cars and cabs kept at a constant 68 degrees.” At the top of the pyramid are the Specialists, “the most knowledgeable and respected employees at Sotheby’s.”

A good Specialist, Gregory notes, is “well versed in both art history and salesmanship” and also has certain talent for theatrics and psychological manipulation: “When owners are reluctant to sell, specialists persuade them that it’s wise to push the property at this particular time (an upcoming museum retrospective, a new Chinese market for a particular artist, an Arab eager to expand his collection.” It is also the Specialist’s job to woo buyers. He or she must “court interest — giving tips to collectors and dramatizing demand.” This polite form of coercion takes place at exclusive cocktail parties. (The New York Times's Laura Holson undoubtedly had similar young women in mind when she penned her 2009 piece on glamorous but privileged Christie's female employees who live large on unglamorous salaries.)

2: SOTHEBY'S THINKS THE REST OF THE ART WORLD IS MADE OF RUBES AND BOZOS

Among the more telling details of the piece is how Gregory depicts the environment as one where a tony veneer only thinly masks callow materialism. “Sotheby’s,” Gregory writes, “felt detached from the posturing that happens in Chelsea galleries and the gnomic garbage that counts for art-world conversation. Auction house employees don’t invoke half-remembered post-structuralism or make inapt analogies. They don’t have to. The prices speak for themselves.”

3: AUCTION CATALOGUE ESSAYS ARE FORMULAIC BULLSHIT 

The auction house's most prominent gesture towards intellectual credibility is the copy that accompanies auction catalogues. Gregory describes the rote process of putting together one of these essays in a way that makes you embarrassed for the big-spenders who take them semi-seriously:

“I sprinkled about twenty adjectives (‘fey,’ ‘gestural,’ ‘restrained’) amid a small repertory of active verbs (‘explore,’ ‘trace,’ ‘question’). I inserted the phrases ‘negative space,’ ‘balanced composition,’ and ‘challenges the viewer’ every so often. X’s lyrical abstraction and visual vocabulary — which is marked by dogged muscularity and a singular preoccupation with the formal qualities of light — ushered in some of the most important art to hit the postwar market in decades… It was embarrassingly easy, and might have been the only truly dishonest part of the Sotheby’s enterprise.”

4: AT SOTHEBY'S, FEMINISM NEVER HAPPENED 

Decades after pants, the pill, the politics of the Gaze, and the interventions of artists like Judy Chicago and the Guerilla Girls, the atmosphere at Sotheby’s remains embarrassingly regressive: “Sotheby’s girls, like rally girls or Suicide Girls — are screened for a certain set of criteria, and though these aren’t explicitly erotic criteria, they are, of course, many clients' sexual preference.” Citing “An Object of Beauty” — Steve Martin’s novel about a graduate who “joins the spice rack of girls at Sotheby’s,” Gregory says that this Spice Rack “is an apt phrase for the sort of self-assured, voluntary objectification we all acquiesced to.” (For what it's worth in the way of corroboration, Holston's NYT piece on Christie's painted a similar, Eisenhower-era picture, describing a cosmopolitan but penniless “sorority of client-advisers and appraisers who spend weekends flying to Palm Beach or the Caribbean hoping to land a big account — and, some of them concede, perhaps a husband.”) 

Gregory describes office politics as a retrograde burlesque show: “Almost all interactions between employees and clients were inflected with an ‘Oh, you stop it now!’ sort of kittenish-ness or steely tough love.” Clients would blindly proposition her over the phone: “Telephone conversations with cold callers included some of the most retrograde propositions I’ve heard outside of Mad Men. That it was possible to be asked on dates by men we have never met, solely based on the summaries of sale results, confirmed for me that there existed, in certain circles, an assumption that asking a faceless Sotheby’s girl out over the phone was a safe bet.” Here’s the zinger: “Thirteen-thirty-four York Avenue, as it turns out is an unimpeachable provenance to have.” Gregory concludes her essay with an anecdote in which she was asked to pose facing one of Andy Warhol’s massive “Fright Wig” self-portraits. The piece had been recently consigned and was being photographed by the New York Times:

“'Oh good, she’s blonde,' said the photographer. I made a face at him... Standing next to the painting, I was a live specimen of powerlessness: in service of sums of money too great and too senseless for me to comprehend. 'Back up a little,' the photographer insisted, 'no that’s too much. Yeah stay right there. I need you to look diminutive.'”

5: SOTHEBY'S MEN ARE THE SPAWN OF DRACULA:

“The men at Sotheby’s greased back their longish hair with some sort of unidentifiable shellac. In their well-tailored suits and leather-soled shoes, they looked like patrician vampires.” Enough said.