Word: arts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...would have been horrendous. Although the firm could have repossessed Irises and put it on the block again, such a move would almost certainly have been a disaster. It might have brought $30 million, maybe $35 million, according to informed sources -- a fire sale. And the results for the art market if the World's Most Expensive Picture lost a third of its value in a year did not bear thinking about. "The last thing in the world we want," a senior Sotheby's executive remarked to Edmund Capon, director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales...
Early in 1989 Bond arranged to send the Van Gogh and five minor impressionist paintings he owned, packaged as "Irises and Five Masterpieces," on a tour of Australian museums, finishing at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth. Irises was set in a double-glazed frame that ensured no one could touch or even closely inspect its surface -- which made some skeptical Aussies suspect it was an exact copy commissioned, for security reasons, by Sotheby...
Soon after the paintings went on display in Perth, curious anomalies arose. Sotheby's suggested to the Art Gallery that Irises might remain on view there for some weeks after the exhibition ended. The trustees of the museum wanted to be sure they would not be held liable for possible damage to Irises; there had already been demonstrations outside, protesting Bond's investments in Chile. The trustees called in government lawyers to check on the insurance of the Van Gogh...
COVER: As the art market explodes, auction houses and dealers are the winners, museums and the public are the losers...
Bids spiral to new records, and foreign investors scramble to buy, shifting old power bases. In a market it no longer controls, America sells more than it buys, the art world turns into the Art Industry, and liquidity is all. The result is that people are being deprived of access to their cultural heritage, and the richness of visual experience is collapsing under the brute weight of price...