Word: auction
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Clearly, the main problem for the auction houses is not a lack of public interest but the shortage of salable material. To lure valuables into the marketplace, they run ads in local papers urging people to rummage through their attics. Sotheby's also runs so-called Heirloom Discovery Days, on which for a small fee expert appraisers evaluate real and imagined treasures. A woman dropped in at its Los Angeles branch with a shoe box of attica that she had planned to give to the Salvation Army; the six Faberge silver-and-enamel pieces she unwrapped sold...
...auction firms also assiduously cultivate known collectors in the hope that, alive or dead, they will some day assign their possessions to the market: auction executives are among the world's most diligent readers of obituary pages. William Doyle, the ebullient Boston-Irish owner of a seven-year-old Manhattan house, who expects to gross $15 million this fiscal year, flies in his own plane to reconnoiter rumored treasures. On a trip to Warrensburg, N.Y., he found a trunkful of letters autographed by five of the signers of the Declaration of Independence...
...ferociously competitive business, similar tactics of search and cultivation are used by major auction houses across the U.S.: Robert W. Skinner Gallery in Bolton, Mass.; Adam A. Weschler & Son and C.G. Sloan & Co. in Washington, D.C.; Mortons in New Orleans; San Francisco's Butterfield & Butterfield; West Palm Beach's Trosby Auction Galleries. The so-called country auction where the city slicker might once snap up for a song a Revere salver or a federal highboy is as distant a memory as the nickel newspaper. Says Scudder Smith, editor of Antiques and Arts Weekly, "You look around some...
...English auction firms are particularly renowned for their well-connected staffers' ability to sniff out what they delicately call "aristocratic sales of necessity" (translation: the duke needs cash). Even the sophisticated rich often have unexpected treasures on their premises. Before sitting down to lunch at their country estate with the Earl and Countess of Verulam, Christie's Oriental ceramics director, Sir John Figgess, asked his host "if there was a cloakroom [bathroom] handy." There were two cloakrooms, allowed Verulam: "You take this one and I'll take that one." In the John that Sir John took...
...past decade or so that the big sales have been covered by the press as Events; the sums paid for art used to be buried in newspapers along with ship arrivals. Now, with the tremendous increases in fine arts prices and the expansion of public interest, big auctions have become flash bulb and video-tape fiestas. To a large extent the transformation has been wrought by Sotheby's, the world's largest, canniest and most aggressive house. In the late '50s Sotheby's introduced such techniques as international telephone hookups, bidding by closed-circuit...