Sotheby's: Bidding for Class.

By Robert Lacey Little, Brown & Co. $26.95

For anyone interested in the history of the class system in the Western world, this book is a delightful romp. You start in the 18th century, when auction houses had the sheen of a cross between a pawn shop and whorehouse -- because they facilitated the dismantling of hereditary worlds -- and you end up with Jackie Kennedy sending Caroline to apprentice at Sotheby's to acquire the ultimate shine in social polish. The book is all about things, often beautiful things, but not always: King Farouk's collection of aspirin tins -- Sotheby's moved in fast when the regime fell -- could hardly be regarded as beautiful. It is all about things and the mystique they can confer on their owners, often a mystique conferred by the identity of the previous owner, as in the case of the aspirin tins, though the provenance of genuine heirlooms has, from the beginning, added to the willingness of a buyer to pay more. It's on these occasions that one sees plainly the function of the auction house as the agent whereby stares was transferred first from a feudal world to an industrial one, and then, over and over again, from old money to new.

There are many aspects of this process that are fascinating. One is that a company like Sotheby's, by putting sacred objects on the block, was in the business of deconstructing the mystique of hereditary wealth and then of art as well -- bringing it down to dollars and cents -- and by doing so gradually came to acquire that mystique itself. (Today buyers often leave the Sotheby sticker on their purchases because of the aura of class that this -- rather than the previous owner -- now confers.) Another intriguing element is intrigue: A certain scurrilous side of the business survived Sotheby's ascendancy into the stratosphere, including routine smuggling in order to evade inconvenient laws -- Peregrine Pollen boarding a plane in Buenos Aires with three very fine impressionist canvases rolled up in a poster tucked under his arm; acceptance and laundering of the products of illegal excavations; passing the objects on to museums happy to allow the old established name of Sotheby's to provide cover; facilitating tax evasion by the wealthy through the international transfer of art; and all sorts of tricky practices surrounding the auctions themselves, such as extending substantial credit to bidders who outstrip their capacity to pay in order to drive up the market. "Sotheby's had no monopoly on amorality, but, as in so many areas, they practiced it better than anyone else," writes Lacey.

So thick is the element of intrigue that Peter Wilson, for many years the head of Sotheby's in this century, was believed by many to be the fifth man in the Burgess-McLean operation. He wasn't, but right up to the very end he had his hands in what are euphemistically called "complicated" art deals. Wilson was the perfect Sotheby's man, a penniless aristocrat at home in the highest circles yet capable of great ruthlessness, a man who made his own rules, above all a man with a passion for beautiful objects, a mercurial man with a great eye.

It would be entirely wrong, however, to view Sotheby's as purely a trader in the snake oil of snobbery. Houses like Sotheby's -- they have been neck and neck with Christies since the two started out: over 200 years ago -- prospered through the tumult of changing times by developing a very solid skill, which was expertise about the objects that they sold. Aristocratic owners were often fuzzy about these matters, having plundered them, in many cases, from equally fuzzy European compatriots who had fallen on hard times, such as the French Revolution. Aristocratic owners had taste, and so did Sotheby's, but Sotheby's could also spot a fake, which is not always the same thing as taste, and Sotheby's could identify great rarity -- and therefore great worth -- which is not always the same thing as taste either. Never, ever did Sotheby's involve itself in passing fakes, or anything of the sort, however mixed up in raffish activities the company might otherwise have been. (This combination of values was seen in even higher relief in Anthony Blunt, who actually was a double agent, and yet was also a passionate lover of art who never would have compromised the truth where matters of scholarship were concerned.) This scholarly capability, this ability to identify provenances exactly both displaced aristocratic connoisseurship and further demystified objects. It was Sotheby's expertise that created a dependency on the part of traffickers in the symbols of class -- whether buyers or sellers -- that, ironically, slowly raised Sotheby's to the point that the name itself was a kind of imprimatur of class.

There is another story well told here, which is that of an idiosyncratic business rich in character and independent in its values -- "a complex and creative world that lived by its own rules" as Lacey puts it -- that is slowly overtaken by the cold corporate world of the late 20th century. The experts are out and the downsizers are in and it becomes all about making money efficiently. Some practices, perhaps, needed to be reformed. "Puzzled as to why the accounts department, which incurred regular bills for weekend overtime, was taking so long to produce figures, [the corporate manager] asked John Cann, the director of administration, to investigate. `They are having orgies,' Cann reported. `They are coming in on Sundays and having sex.'" But even a sex-free staff was unable to produce proper figures because none had been kept. "`It was a clash of philosophies,' remembers Peregrine Pollen. `Traditionally we had always taken risks and we lived on our wits. The record keeping did not matter, and we didn't worry much about the expenses either. We didn't worry about the bottom line.'" Lacey speculates that, following new wealth as always, the field of action for Sotheby's in the next century will be in Asia as it was in America in this century: Perhaps the book went to press before the recent crash in Asia, but the point is that the West is likely to be left behind for classes elsewhere that are scrambling to acquire our worst characteristics.

This is a paradox of democracy: The more open a system becomes, the more enamored those who succeed seem to be of the trappings of closed systems. Capitalism is supposed to be the agent of democracy, yet it seems to lead unerringly in the direction of marketing snobbery. (In its somewhat raffish way, Sotheby's has tried, with varying success, to cash in its acquired snob appeal directly by marketing various articles, such as cigarettes, under its name.) A quality like expertise is inherently democratic because it cuts through all mystique to artistic value, aesthetic and historical, and yet, in a bewildering twist, it ends up reinforcing the silliest aspects of snobbery -- even turning snobbery into a commodity in itself. A possible moral: Sotheby's survived, and thrived, because it was never fooled by the snobbery it marketed. Expertise immunized it, as did frank knowledge of its own skullduggery. Robert Lacey does not probe these paradoxes, but his tale, well told, takes us through the territory.

SUZANNAH LESSARD, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly and frequent contributor to the New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, is currently writing a book on the state 0f American society as interpreted through the landscape.