Word: auction
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...Vitus's dance of zeros across the checkbook: $5,544,000 for a Velasquez; a Titian, The Death of Actaeon, sold to Paul Getty for a little over $4,000,000; last week a Renoir, purchased for $16.80 a century ago, fetched $1,159,200 at a London auction. The list could be prolonged almost indefinitely, and will be: before the '70s are out, the first $10 million painting will probably have gone under the hammer. It does not take a very puritanical conscience to deduce that this involves a grotesque inversion of values, a crisis...
THREE weeks ago, a table was sold at auction in London. It had been made in France somewhere around 1780, probably by a craftsman named Martin Carlin: a spindly, exquisite and useless object, all tulipwood and Sevres porcelain plaques, the very epitome of the court taste of Louis XVI. An Iranian oilman named Henri Sabet paid $415,800 for it and so became the owner of the most expensive piece of furniture in history...
...collectors and museum curators like to talk in terms of world culture; but in the auction house they behave like chauvinists. Many critics have noted how the cult of masterpiece value caricatures the historical values of art by creating an unreal scale of "importance." It is equally probable that the cost for acquisitions does violence to geographical as well as historical culture by making it hard for countries to hold the art they have against the battering pressure of foreign capital...
...retrieving from the hyperactive market some means of preserving what is not for sale? Arguably, there is. Assuming that the appetites of collectors will not diminish in the near future, governments might well impose a conservation tax on every work of art that is sold at auction for more than, say, $100,000. The figure need not be high; 5% would rake off millions of dollars annually into a pool that could be administered by some suitable international body for conservation and restoration needs-in urban space, architecture, sculpture, painting -anywhere in the world...
...auction house, amid the deep carpets and the reverent murmur of bids, such prices are made to look like a belated homage to genius. In fact they are nothing of the kind. They represent a crass transformation of aesthetic experience into commodity. They stem from two iron rules of the market: 1) that as money devalues, it seeks to embody itself in commodities that seem more stable than bank notes or stock; 2) that a painting or sculpture has no "real" value at all. It is worth what some collector can be induced to pay for it, not a cent...