Word: auction
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...Arts. Though he took campaign contributions from the South Korean lobbyist Tongsun Park, Thompson has been regarded by his fellow Congressmen as an honest politician. In fact, he enthusiastically advocated public financing of election campaigns. "The House," he said not long ago, "needs to be taken off the auction block...
...sell-off was spurred partly by rumors that the U.S. was planning a surprise gold auction of as much as 6 million oz. in an effort to break the price runup. Though the Administration denied the rumors, the U.S. could well afford such an auction. The nation's gold reserves are still far and away the largest on earth, totaling some 276 million oz. At last week's closing price, the reserves were worth some $165 billion, or more than twice as much as those of second-ranked West Germany. By comparison, the Soviet Union's official...
...most effective, quick step that the U.S. could take to pop the bubble would be to auction off a chunk of its 180-million-oz. silver stockpile, the only substantial official reserve of the metal left in the world. An auction would help cool down the markets for all precious metals, including gold. Some lower Treasury officials last week discussed how to stem the gold and silver stampede, but decided to hold back when rumors of a gold auction alone were enough to cahn the markets. Said one Treasury official to TIME Washington Economic Correspondent William Blaylock at week...
There are some kinds of success, the painter Edgar Degas once remarked, that are indistinguishable from panic. So it seems with the present boom in the art market. For the past 15 years or so, collectors, dealers, auction houses and their willing accomplices, journalists, have been moved to pleasure, then wonder, and now to a sort of popeyed awe at the upward movement of art prices. If art was once expected to provoke un nouveau frisson, a new kind of shudder, its present function is to become a new type of bullion. Thus, we are told by art industry flacks...
...like. Quite simply, it is now difficult and, for most people, impossible to walk into a gallery and look at a work of art without its "value"-which means simply price, real or hypothetical-intruding on their reflections. After Velazquez's Juan de Pareja was bought at auction for New York's Metropolitan Museum for $5.5 million in 1970, the then director of the Met insisted, in his usual peppy, overbearing fashion, that the fuss about the price was all nonsense: in ten years' time nobody would care or even remember what the Met had laid...