A powerful art dealer who presents a convincing portrait of international success pulls an idealistic young gallery assistant into his web of lies. This sharp, edgy social thriller explores the price of ambition in the decadent underbelly of the high-end art world.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from The Spectacle by Anna Barrington, which is out July 8th 2025.
Nobody knows quite who Rudolph Sullivan is, or how he ascended so quickly to the glittering top of New York’s art scene. When aspiring artist and struggling gallery assistant Ingrid meets the charismatic dealer at a party, she falls fast—Rudolph offers her a seductive taste of luxury and an escape from her humdrum existence.
But Rudolph is hiding much more than his dazzling facade lets on. With insatiable tastes and a need to keep up appearances, his debts mount rapidly, and he turns to double dealing to stay afloat. As his adversaries close in, Rudolph realizes his fall from grace could cost him more than his reputation. Panicking, paranoid, and willing to sacrifice anyone to maintain his precarious foothold, he plans his most audacious gambit yet—and Ingrid is at the center of it.
Ingrid was promoted a few days before Simone’s exhibition opened.
It was one of those blooming, burgeoning, green-gold spring mornings in New York that set your teeth on edge with pleasure.
She walked to work for the first time in months, under the trees swirling in the wind like falling umbrellas. A new season in the air, as if you too could become a new person along with the budding cherry blossoms. . . .
“Ingrid,” Paul shouted. “Get in here.”
He was waiting in his office, a discarded plate of sushi lying beside him. “Bad tuna,” he commented, seeing her glance, and gestured to a chair. “Sit down, all right?”
After thirty, forty years in power, Paul strode into rooms like a powerful prize bull. He was nothing like Rudolph, that whirling quick-tongued animal; not even Paul’s recent melancholy could shake the overriding sense of a man in absolute control of his kingdom.
Ingrid sat, wondering if she’d done anything wrong. For the first time she noticed Claudia, coiled up in the chair behind Paul’s desk, her watchful eyes flat and silent. Ingrid had an icy premonition that she was about to be fired.
“So, we just wanted to have a little chat with you about a couple of things.”
Paul cleared his throat, pushed his square-rimmed glasses up his nose.
“You are very well liked in the office,” Paul said consideringly. “Respected, even.”
“Oh—thank you.”
“I’m aware that we haven’t had much of a chance to thank you for what you’ve done for us, with Simone. Bringing her on, I mean.”
“I couldn’t have done it without Claudia’s help,” Ingrid said, trying to smile.
“But of course.” Paul waved a hand, as if he’d expected this.
“Claudia’s let me know how much she helped you. But it is still impressive. In fact, it’s about the biggest opportunity someone in your position has ever offered us. And, well, we like your gumption.”
Ingrid thanked him again.
“I’ll get to the point,” he enunciated slowly. “We’ve decided to make you Simone’s artist liaison.”
Ingrid stared at him. Paul was still speaking, rattling off benefits and a salary raise and a title change and needing to interview a replacement assistant, but his voice became a low inchoate buzz.
“With more money comes more responsibility,” he warned her. “There will be no one to blame for your mistakes now. But you could become—you have the opportunity to become the most valuable, the most irreplaceable person here.” He leaned forward. “There’s an opportunity here, but you need to grab hold of it with both hands.”
He peered hard at Ingrid. Paul had a way of looking at you, with his icy, penetrating stare, his pale blue eyes probing your face like the long pools of a lighthouse casting its search lamps out to sea. Her heart turned over. For a minute she felt paralyzed: Could he read her mind? She wanted to cry out, No! I want to be an artist!
But that path was closed to her. She gathered her wits and said, as fiercely as she could, “I do want this. I really want to work here.”
“Good.”
He settled back in his chair, his eyes shining with faith now. He wants me to succeed, she realized with a start. I can succeed here. If I want to.
“Really, Paul, I—I won’t let you down. Thank you. Thank you both.”
Paul gave a stiff nod, awkward at the praise, and waved her away.
“All right. Well. That’s all, Ingrid.”
She thanked him again and went back to her desk.
This morning, she had been doing her lipstick. She had chosen a new color—raspberry, much darker than she would normally have chosen—but strangely enough, it suited her. In the mirror, looking at herself, she had stopped, momentarily taken aback by what she saw. One of Them. Her blinking reflection in the mirror seemed to inhabit the body of someone older, sharper, glossier. Someone more like . . . Claudia.
In the meeting, she had vaguely noticed how Claudia’s face, while Paul was speaking, had remained very still. She had said nothing during the entire meeting, Ingrid realized. Not a single word.
Be careful, a voice inside her whispered.
The day of Simone’s exhibition opening flashed by as quickly as money changes hands. All morning Ingrid fielded alternately desperate, pleading, enraged calls from clients, everyone begging for a shot at Simone’s work. The answer was always the same.
“I’m so sorry, but all of the works have been previously sold. But if you want to buy a work from another part of our program, we might be able to move you up the list.”
“Realistically,” one tech prodigy shouted down the phone, “realistically, I can buy you and your shitty little gallery ten times over if I wanted to. I’m a third-generation collector and my family’s got a lot of assets, so you don’t get to ask me about the rest of your program. The only thing worth a dime anyway is Simone Machado. I want the best and I want it now, and realistically you should beg for my patronage—”
But Ingrid had already hung up.
Then she was dashing up and down the stairs, arranging wineglasses, soothing an anxious Simone, talking to yet another inquisitive journalist on the phone. What was Simone like? they wanted to know. Why did she use those colors? What was the meaning behind the shadowy figures in her paintings, the half-eaten apple on the bed? Was it true that she had specifically re-created the exact Canada balsam glaze Titian had once used to paint Venus of Urbino? Even Paul was shocked by the chaos, the sheer all-devouring appetite threatening to consume Simone’s show before it had even opened.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said, shaking his head. “Not in thirty years.”
Having no way of comparing, Ingrid restricted herself to a simple nod of agreement.
“And do her paintings even really merit it?” he wondered aloud.
He eyed Ingrid with a dubious look. It was not, she thought, a stupid question. In this upside-down world, sometimes you could not tell the difference between good and bad.
So he and Ingrid looked up. Simone’s paintings hung on the walls. Nude women roamed darkened cells; their lips dripped blue-black juice, and their unblinking eyes, scrubbed of pupils, stared out at the viewer with a sharp ferocity, as if they might slip out of the paintings and into the gallery like violent ghosts. They confused Ingrid. Still, she sensed their power. Simone seemed to have captured something beyond her own knowledge, beyond her own environment. Like a message for the future to decode: They burned with life.
