Anthony is a British-American writer, reporter, and cartoonist whose sardonic wit has bitten many in the art world. His book True Colors: The Real Life of the Art World (1998) skewers that powerful social triumvirate of major collectors, art dealers, and museum curators whose confluence of art, money, and power affects contemporary taste while obscuring real talent. His irreverent eye continues to poke fun at high art society in The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco and the Culture of the Night (2009) and In the Mean Time — The Other Ends of the World (2010). His wisecracks continue with cartoons in the The New York Observer and are collected in his book The Chronicles of Now (2002).
Anthony’s articles and stories about the art world have appeared in many publications including Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Esquire, Radar, and Britain’s Financial Times, Observer Magazine, Sunday Telegraph, and GQ. He wrote and narrated the 1979 Emmy award-winning PBS documentary, The Affluent Immigrants (the subject of which is sometimes less politely known as Eurotrash). On Anthony’s website he says that today “Art fairs are the new disco” but makes the positive observation that valid discoveries and rediscoveries such as ours indicate that “the pantheon of great contemporary artists is like the arctic ice shelves — melting.”
