Word: two
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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 the Big Two, however. Christie's, closely followed in London by Sotheby...
...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, he found a mid-14th century underglaze copper red-and-white wine jar. The Ming jar sold-at Christie's, naturally...
...two highest: Velazquez's Portrait of Juan de Pareja, $5.5 million, in 1970; Titian's Death of Actaeon, $4 million...
Pivar, who already owns canvases by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Bouguereau and Burne-Jones, is constantly expanding his collection, which is already far too large to display in his cavernous two-story bachelor apartment off Manhattan's Central Park. He concedes that his paintings of diabolic winged creatures, furiously driven chariots and diaphanously clad maidens are basically "decor," adding: "You are not supposed to look at the paintings, they look "at you. The art puts out the energy." Anything that produces energy these days should be profitable, of course, and Pivar's collection is no exception. "Since I started...
...zquez, turning it from one painting among others into a dead whale on a flatcar, a curiosity to be gawped at. To most people visiting the Met, Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, bought amid vast publicity in 1961 for $2.3 million, is still "the two-million-dollar Rembrandt." It is removed, none too subtly, from all other Rembrandts. In the meantime, the clichés of art appreciation-"masterpiece," "genius," "deep humanity," "quality," "values" and the rest of that fustian-become, in the face of a spiraling market, a dead language, analogous to advertising copy...