Word: auction
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Auction has transformed the very nature of the art sale. In 1983 the old English firm of Sotheby's was taken over by A. Alfred Taubman, American conglomerator, real estate giant and collector. The deal had to be approved by Britain's Monopolies and Mergers Commission. At the commission hearings, Taubman declared that he would be "very concerned" if the public ever got the idea that Sotheby's was centered anywhere but Britain, and that the "traditional nature of the business and of the services offered would be changed as little as possible." Request approved...
...next few years, changed its business to such an extent that its lending and other investment services generated $240 million in 1988 -- nearly a tenth of Sotheby's gross income of $2.3 billion. What Taubman saw (and staider Christie's was not slow to pick up) was that an auction house could go directly to the public, not only at low price levels but also at very high ones. In the past, auction houses sold mainly to dealers, who put on their markup and then sold to their clients. People were shy of going to auctions; the whole apparatus...
...harping on the investment value of art, by hiring personable young sales cadres to explain the significance of the Meissen jug or the not-quite-Rubens, by creating user-friendly expertise, the auctioneers defused this wariness. By the early '80s dealers were getting cut out of the game by collectors buying directly at auction. And by 1988, when the auction room had been promoted into a Reagan-decade cathouse of febrile extravagance, where people in black tie and jewels applauded winning bids as though they were arias sung by heroic tenors, private dealers (at least those dealing in the work...
...ruthless habitat of the '80s. It is not true either, as anyone knows who has followed the fortunes of the two houses, that Sotheby's is all hustle and Christie's all starch. In fact, it was Christie's that got into trouble with the law over falsifying an auction. In 1985 David Bathurst admitted that four years earlier, when he was president of Christie's New York branch, he had reported selling two paintings that had not, in fact, found buyers at auction in New York: a Van Gogh at a supposed price of $2.1 million and a Gauguin...
...auction practice that has attracted the most criticism lately -- and goes to the heart of the nature of auctions themselves and the ethics of the trade -- is giving guarantees to the seller of a work of art and loans to the buyer. If X has a work of art that auctioneer Y wants to sell, Y can issue a "guarantee" that X will get, say, $5 million from the sale. If the work does not make $5 million, X still gets his check, but the work remains with the auction house for later sale. Guarantees are a strong inducement...