Word: auctioneers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...some critics, the auction houses' success is excessive. While no one blames them for dizzy prices-they are not their bidders' keepers-even dealers who are making wild profits as a result of the art boom evince a certain distaste for the whole process. London's Waddington points out that the auction world's Big Two, unlike most thriving corporations, do not plow back even part of their profits into research, grants for young artists or gifts to museums. Says he: "They are simply dealing in commodities." There is a gavel-size black cloud over...
...auction as a news and social spectacular came to full flower with Sotheby's acquisition of Manhattan's Parke-Bernet in 1964. Christie's, its more decorous rival, came to New York 13 years later and has been more cautious about expanding worldwide. (Sotheby's has 42 international bases, Christie's 29.) Not totally tongue in cheek, Christie's maintains that "Sotheby's is a businessman pretending to be a gentleman, while Christie's is a gentleman pretending to be a businessman...
...assist the bank's millionaire clients in acquiring artworks for investment. Though Sotheby's insists that the arrangement contains sufficient built-in checks and balances to dispel any suspicion of conflict of interest, many people in the art world are skeptical of any deal whereby an auction house may in effect end up supporting its own market. Says David Bathurst, Christie's New York president: "Using art as an investment scares the hell out of me. There's going to be a flood of money in and out, leaving a sound market devastated because of people...
There are some kinds of success, the painter Edgar Degas once remarked, that are indistinguishable from panic. So it seems with the present boom in the art market. For the past 15 years or so, collectors, dealers, auction houses and their willing accomplices, journalists, have been moved to pleasure, then wonder, and now to a sort of popeyed awe at the upward movement of art prices. If art was once expected to provoke un nouveau frisson, a new kind of shudder, its present function is to become a new type of bullion. Thus, we are told by art industry flacks...
...like. Quite simply, it is now difficult and, for most people, impossible to walk into a gallery and look at a work of art without its "value"-which means simply price, real or hypothetical-intruding on their reflections. After Velazquez's Juan de Pareja was bought at auction for New York's Metropolitan Museum for $5.5 million in 1970, the then director of the Met insisted, in his usual peppy, overbearing fashion, that the fuss about the price was all nonsense: in ten years' time nobody would care or even remember what the Met had laid...