Word: auction
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...James Wood the damage comes down to a confusion between aesthetic and material value. "When a work of art passes through our doors, it should leave the world of economics," says Wood. "Walking through a great museum is not going to give you a profile that reflects the auction market. You have to educate people to grasp that the money paid for a work of art is utterly secondary to its lasting value, its ability to make them respond...
...would be $5 billion, and the show could never be done. In the wake of Irises, every Van Gogh owner wants to believe his painting is worth $50 million and will not let it off the wall if insured for less. Even there, the problem is compounded by the auction houses: when consulted on insurance values or by the IRS, they tend to stick the maximum imaginable price on a painting to maintain the image of its market value and tempt the owner to sell...
...Auction has transformed the very nature of the art sale. In 1983 the old English firm of Sotheby's was taken over by A. Alfred Taubman, American conglomerator, real estate giant and collector. The deal had to be approved by Britain's Monopolies and Mergers Commission. At the commission hearings, Taubman declared that he would be "very concerned" if the public ever got the idea that Sotheby's was centered anywhere but Britain, and that the "traditional nature of the business and of the services offered would be changed as little as possible." Request approved...
...next few years, changed its business to such an extent that its lending and other investment services generated $240 million in 1988 -- nearly a tenth of Sotheby's gross income of $2.3 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...
...harping on the investment value of art, by hiring personable young sales cadres to explain the significance of the Meissen jug or the not-quite-Rubens, by creating user-friendly expertise, the auctioneers defused this wariness. By the early '80s dealers were getting cut out of the game by collectors buying directly at auction. And by 1988, when the auction room had been promoted into a Reagan-decade cathouse of febrile extravagance, where people in black tie and jewels applauded winning bids as though they were arias sung by heroic tenors, private dealers (at least those dealing in the work...