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Steve Martin is a film actor and a former stand-up comedian. He is also an amateur banjo player, a children’s-book author, and a collector of works by blue-chip artists ranging from Eric Fischl to Georges Seurat. He is, as well, the living embodiment of the phrase "spreading yourself too thin." With his third novel, "An Object of Beauty," Martin merges two of his hobbies — art and fiction writing — and spawns a limp, hackneyed saga of New York’s culture scene from 1997 through the present day.

The book’s cipher of a narrator, the 30-something "intellectual nerd" Daniel Chester French Franks, is an occasional ARTnews critic and a self-admitted bore. Franks relates the story of Lacey Yeager, an upwardly mobile art world denizen and part-time succubus. In the late 1990s, Yeager gets her start cataloguing minor pieces at Sotheby’s. With her talent for appearing "fuckable, but not without a bit of work," she catches the eye of the Eurotrash collector Patrice Claire, and it’s off to the races: a business trip to Russia, hobnobbing with the esteemed gallerist Barton Talley, feverishly plotting ways to climb New York’s social ladder. And climb she does, from her lowly Sotheby’s job to a plum spot at Talley’s gallery to her own space in Chelsea. Yeager delves deep into the machinations of the art market and loses her soul in the process, "converting objects of beauty into objects of value." She gradually realizes that seduction is the currency of success, and she becomes a profligate spender.

The book contains its share of intrigue, auction fraud — and, of course, sex. The last is, sadly, rendered in heartbreakingly clinical prose, replete with botched metaphors. Satisfying his lust for Yeager in Moscow, for example, Claire "moved her underwear to one side and his fingers slipped in effortlessly, as though they were being drawn up by osmosis." Graphic episodes of cunnilingus take place beneath a priceless Matisse. One imagines Martin’s writing desk strewn with a copy of "The $12 Million Stuffed Shark," a half-empty bottle of Viagra, and a few early editions of Penthouse. Lacey Yeager is essentially a porn construct — a sexually voracious brainiac who gleefully imagines her "true face" as resembling those of de Kooning’s women.

Clearly, Martin’s goal was to produce a quasi-critical gloss on the art world. Unfortunately, he is a crummy guide to the recent past, and the opinions he puts in Franks’s mouth are far from authoritative: Warhol is probably not as worthy as the Old Masters, even if he did burst the machismo bubble of the Ab-Ex crowd; single artistic movements may have dominated previous decades, but today the art world is a Balkanized landscape of confounding subgenres like "angry pussy," "high-craft OCD," and "junk on the floor." Martin buzzes through all the hot spots on the contemporary timeline, from 9/11’s effect on the market to the Chinese-art boom and the recent financial meltdown. He wants to capture an insider’s game but, aware that most people who will purchase his book are far removed from the art world, has produced instead a shallow cultural history and stunted work of fiction.

Which brings us to the writing — specifically, Martin’s gleeful abuse of the simile: "Lacey’s emotions began flip-flopping like one of Winslow Homers just-landed trout"; "We imposed a moratorium on saying ‘phone sex,’ which, like an Arab-Israeli cease-fire, took longer to take effect than it should have." The problem with being Steve Martin seems to be that your editor is afraid to edit you. "You want to know how I think art should be taught to children?" Patrice Claire asks in one of the novel’s few witty passages. "Take them to a museum and say, ‘This is art, and you can’t do it.’" If only someone had been so forthright with Steve Martin, novelist.

"An Object of Beauty" will be released by Grand Central on November 23rd.

"High Culture, Soft Porn: Steve Martin's Art World Flop" originally appeared in the October 2010 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2010 Table of Contents.