Word: cash
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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English auction firms are particularly renowned for their well-connected staffers' ability to sniff out what they delicately call "aristocratic sales of necessity" (translation: the duke needs cash). Even the sophisticated rich often have unexpected treasures on their premises. Before sitting down to lunch at their country estate with the Earl and Countess of Verulam, Christie's Oriental ceramics director, Sir John Figgess, asked his host "if there was a cloakroom [bathroom] handy." There were two cloakrooms, allowed Verulam: "You take this one and I'll take that one." In the John that Sir John took...
...amassed by acquisitors possessed of taste and love for the objects they buy. They have not generally been dis couraged by hard times. On the contrary, in recessions and depressions and inflations, the smart ones tend to liquidate stocks, bonds and real estate and thus have all the more cash to invest in other fields. Like art. Given the scar city of beautiful things and the insatiable demand for them, the sales will undoubtedly continue to take the bread and make the circuses. The Romans would love it. - Michael Demarest
...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, people now respect art. They flock to museums to see it; its spiritual value has been confirmed, for millions, by its wondrous convertibility into cash. You can't argue with it. It means something if somebody pays $2.5 million for a lummocking spread of icebergs by Frederic Church, a salon machine whose pedestrian invocations of the sublime are not worth one square foot of a good Turner...
This culture is now getting to the point where everything that can be regarded, however distantly, as a work of art is primarily esteemed not for its ability to communicate meaning, or its use as historical evidence, or its capacity to generate aesthetic pleasure, but for its convertibility into cash. The exoticism of high price generates curiosity, and this curiosity fills the museum, turning it into a low-rating mass medium. But there it collides with an older American tradition, the 19th century reformist belief that contact with works of art is morally elevating and that museums are, in spirit...
...year they sold thousands of messages, diagrams and computer codes to the resident Soviet agents, including a KGB colonel with steel teeth. The Soviets wound up unwittingly bankrolling Daulton's drug operation, and the pair came to grief only after an unannounced delivery to the embassy to raise cash for a big drug deal. The friends turned against each other at their trials, Christopher saying he had been blackmailed into stealing the secrets by his former friend, Daulton insisting that all along he had been told they were working for the U.S., spreading false information. Judge and jury were...