Word: kind
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...banker. In the mid-1920s, the firm of Louis Comfort Tiffany dumped carloads of the then unpopular art nouveau glassware that bears his stamp; a well-preserved rare Tiffany lamp today can be worth up to $150,000. By one estimate, the U.S. boasts 22 million collectors of one kind or another, mostly another. There are no junk stores any more, only antique shoppes...
...What kind of people are spending for such things? And why? An immensely wealthy individual-a Getty, a Norton Simon, a Mellon-finds in great art what eluded Alexander of Macedon-a last world to conquer. It is a lust to which overachievers have been notoriously susceptible, from Catherine the Great, who built Leningrad's incomparable Hermitage ("I am not a nibbler but a glutton") to U.S. Industrialist Joseph Hirshhorn, the great benefactor of the Smithsonian ("I have a madman's rage for art"). To be sure, such stupendous collectors and donors still make record purchases...
...scored in real estate is becoming an increasing part of our clientele. Also there are successful young lawyers who are investing in antiques for their homes and offices." The protests of purists notwithstanding, many people are buying tangibles as a green hedge against wilting paper of whatever kind, dollars or marks, stocks or bonds. As Sotheby's chairman, Peter Wilson, points out: "There's not a single person who believes that if you put $100 in an envelope and decide you want to give it to your son when he is 21, in 20 years' time that...
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...
...pure, irrational desire, and their economic fate proved that nothing is more manipulable than desire. When the mania fell away, the flowers were as pretty as they had been before. It was just that now few people wanted them very much, whereas before they had been invested with a kind of fetishistic and obsessive "rarity." Bullion is not absolute; its value is a matter of assignation, of social agreement. Tulip bulbs are no longer bullion, and it is not hard to imagine a time when art will not be either. It has happened before, and can easily happen again. Those...