Word: auction
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There is an instant chic, a feeling of sophistication, in visiting auction rooms; decorated with pricey art and antique furniture, they resemble a cockney's dream of ducal halls. Sotheby's main salesroom in London, hung with chandeliers and often lined with valuable paintings, resembles a grand ballroom. Christie's, a few blocks away, has the slightly more venerable atmosphere of a London men's club. However, the principal attraction of an auction house before a sale is that it enables the viewer to make closer and longer observation of art works than he can possibly...
...important auction combines the tension of an operatic first night with the ambience of a celebrity party. A top auctioneer has the talents of a croupier, a fight promoter and a matinee idol. As SPB President John Marion, who has wielded the gavel for 18 years, said to TIME'S Georgia Harbison: "A good auctioneer is very much like a good lecturer. Everyone should understand what's going on and be sitting forward in his seat." He added: "Sometimes the atmosphere in the salesroom is absolutely crackling. The eyes of the whole world...
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...