When John Seed first glimpsed the art world, as a Stanford student in the late 1970s, he knew he had found his future. Mentored by Nathan Oliveira, introduced to collecting by Hunk and Moo Anderson and invited over by Richard Diebenkorn, Seed thought he had entered a world of sophistication and grace. Things got messy fast in the early 80s when painter Joan Brown told Seed "You need your ass kicked," and Seed's encounters with a young dealer named...