Word: americans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...auction. Among several categories of fine arts that experts believe to be underpriced but rapidly appreciating in value: 17th century old master drawings and prints; Victorian furniture, paintings, drawings, porcelain, silver and antiques of all kinds; Japanese pottery and porcelain, ivory and enamels; Italian baroque paintings and Renaissance statuary; American primitives; Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquities. Also upward bound are American Indian artifacts, antique gold watches, rare manuscripts, books and autographs, Victorian and Edwardian jewelry, and art deco furniture. It seems that nothing that can be collected is being neglected. Well, almost nothing. Among the few items that have...
...commodities." There is a gavel-size black cloud over the Big Two, however. Christie's, closely followed in London by Sotheby's, in 1975 tacked a 10% buyer's premium on all sales (in addition to the average 10% commission charged the seller). English dealers with American backing sued the two firms for collusion and restraint of trade. The case will not even come to trial for an other year; in the U.S., where the same surcharge has been levied, a dealer's suit may be played all over again...
...Investors For Atlanta's Noel and Kathy Wadsworth, investing in art is a full-time occupation. Last April, Wadsworth, 43, sold his thriving 20-year-old carpet plant in Dalton, Ga., in order to concentrate on what had been the couple's consuming interest: collecting French and American impressionists. "We've always been interested in art, and we'd always bought local artists," he explains. "Then, five or six years ago, we just had a yearning for artists who were names in books, fine art, artists who were dead...
...does the art boom benefit? Only collectors and middlemen. Few artists get to share in it. This is partly because boom conditions create an unreal system of reputation, with most of the benefits going to a handful of stars at the top and scarcely anything to the rest. The American art education system, churning out as many graduate artists every five years as there were people in late 15th century Florence, has in effect created an unemployable art proletariat whose work society cannot "profitably" absorb. Generous tax laws, which enabled collectors to buy low, keep a picture for years...
...communicate meaning, or its use as historical evidence, or its capacity to generate aesthetic pleasure, but for its convertibility into cash. The exoticism of high price generates curiosity, and this curiosity fills the museum, turning it into a low-rating mass medium. But there it collides with an older American tradition, the 19th century reformist belief that contact with works of art is morally elevating and that museums are, in spirit, secular churches. In the eddies of this confluence, the work of art, battered and sucked this way and that by incompatible necessities, becomes simultaneously prominent and invisible...