Word: auction
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...Great Auction Wave in contemporary art, which rose amid the financial euphoria of 1982 and crested in late 1989, is now over, vanished into the sand. Just as one of its signs was the auction-room applause that greeted some new price level -- $17 million for a Jasper Johns, $20.7 million for a De Kooning -- so its end was marked by another kind of applause...
...came on the evening of Tuesday, Nov. 6, at a sale at Sotheby's in New York City. Anh in a Spanish Landscape, a large 1988 image done in broken plates by the Meatball Hero of the epoch, Julian Schnabel, was hoisted onto the auction block. It had been bought in London for $225,000 in 1989 by a Canadian speculator with Hong Kong money. Then the owner consigned it for sale to a New York gallery, where it hung for some weeks with a price tag of $650,000 on it. No takers. Feeling the pinch, the owner sent...
Some 56% of the art in the Sotheby's auction failed to find a buyer, despite the house's pre-sale efforts to get sellers to lower their reserves. The "star" offering, Robert Rauschenberg's Third Time Painting, 1961, sold for $3.08 million after its low estimate had been reduced by $1 million on the eve of the sale, to a range of $3 million to $4 million...
...following night at Christie's was a slight improvement, because the estimates were more realistic and the works themselves somewhat better. Nevertheless, 48% of the works failed to sell. The auction had one very fine De Kooning, July, 1956, which sold for $8.8 million against the estimates of $5 million to $7 million. It might have been a $15 million painting a year ago, but at least its price offset the fact that none of the other De Koonings in the sale -- all later or inferior works -- found buyers. Philip Guston's Summer, 1954, joined the De Kooning...
...granting preferential admissions treatment for the sake of a few bucks isn't wrong--and Fitzsimmons says it isn't--then why not just auction off "tip" stickers to the highest bidders, to be attached to application forms in the promise of special consideration? It would be much more economically efficient and not a bit less just...