Word: puts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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 of reserves, attributions, codes and bids seemed mysterious and scary. Scratch your nose at the wrong moment, the urban folktale went, and -- yikes! -- you've bought a Rembrandt...
...another. Stiffer rules are pending, including those governing loans. The current consumer affairs code says that "if an auctioneer makes loans or advances money to consignors and/or prospective purchasers, this fact must be conspicuously disclosed in the auctioneer's catalog." But did this mean that Sotheby's put a note in the catalog of its November 1987 sale saying it had given one Alan Bond a loan of half the hammer price, repayment terms to be negotiated, on Irises? Think again...
...York fall auctions. There he underbid the $20.68 million De Kooning and bought, among other things, a Johns for $12.1 million. "I thought Saatchi had good intentions," Scully says. "Now it turns out that he's only a superdealer. These guys create price levels for themselves. They put one painting in a sale and bid it up to huge levels. And the artist loses control of his work, while his relations with the dealer he has worked with so long go for nothing, absolutely nothing. We are just pawns...
...detractors say, perhaps unfairly, that if you put Gagosian and the rest of his ilk in a bag and shook it for a week you wouldn't get an ounce of connoisseurship. But that is not what counts. What does count is the instinct for when to grab the chicken, the hot artist, and get a lock on his or her work...
...auction house had no choice. It had punctually paid John Payson the full sale amount, $49 million, and now the exposure of the buyer's inability to pay for the painting would have been horrendous. Although the firm could have repossessed Irises and put it on the block again, such a move would almost certainly have been a disaster. It might have brought $30 million, maybe $35 million, according to informed sources -- a fire sale. And the results for the art market if the World's Most Expensive Picture lost a third of its value in a year...