Word: auction
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Until last week. Then, in Moscow, the London-based auction house Sotheby's staged the first international art auction ever held in the Soviet Union. An eager crowd of 2,000 packed the ballroom of the Sovincenter, a lavish hotel and conference complex usually off limits to Soviet citizens, to gaze on an array of works that in many cases had rarely been exhibited before, much less sold openly. Bidding was restricted to foreigners who could pay with British pounds...
...that the request is coming from America's biggest creditor. "Why, yes, of course," he replies. The Prime Minister thanks him, adding, "I am certain that your help will reassure our private investors enough so that they will buy their usual share of Treasury bills at next Tuesday's auction...
...gold chain fetched $319,000. A two-handled gold cup went for $275,000. The only treasure not up for auction at what Christie's New York called the most spectacular shipwreck sale in history was the $1 million worth of salvaged gold draped around Mel Fisher's well-tanned neck. He is the 65-year- old treasure hunter whose 20-year search for sunken bullion finally paid off three years ago, when he discovered the main cargo of the Nuestra Seora de Atocha, a booty-laden Spanish galleon that foundered in stormy seas off Florida's Key West...
...Warhol being the big exceptions. Merely to see his blond hair and round glasses across a crowded room, let alone hear his Yorkshire voice droning unstoppably on about Picasso, cubism and his own photography, turns the knees of collectors to jelly. When Actor Steve Martin pays $330,000 at auction for a medium-good, medium-size drawing of Andy Warhol by Hockney, as he did last month, one knows that some overriding program in the fame machinery has kicked in and will not soon be turned...
Proceeds from the auction -- after Sotheby's 10% commission -- will go to the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, established in the artist's will. And the foundation need hardly fear that Warholmania will fade after the final gavel. Also under way are major exhibits, movie retrospectives, books and the franchising of the Warhol name on a line of sportswear, watches, collector's plates and home furnishings. The marketing of the mystique seems perfectly natural in the case of a man who once declared, "Good business is the best art." Nonetheless, last week's inflated auction prices were "queasy...