Word: auctioner
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...boom lasts forever, and this spring may be remembered as the moment when the art-auction frenzy of the late 1980s began its decline. In the big sales in New York City over the past two weeks, despite freakish prices for two great paintings, the auction market was showing ominous signs of instability. For Van Gogh and Renoir, in Japan, there was no ceiling. For other artists, including some highly promoted contemporary ones, the floor was shaky...
...Tuesday night at Christie's, Van Gogh's melancholy portrait of his physician, Dr. Gachet, sold to the Japanese dealer Hideto Kobayashi for $82.5 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for a work of art. Kobayashi bought the painting on behalf of noted Japanese collector Ryoei Saito, a paper-manufacturing executive. Two nights later, at Sotheby's, Kobayashi again acted for Saito in bidding $78.1 million for one of the best Renoirs in America, Au Moulin de la Galette...
...high end of the market, driven by Japanese fixations on Renoir and Van Gogh, had ceased to pull the rest. A week earlier, Sotheby's contemporary auction was a flop, with overall sales totaling little more than $55 million against estimates of about $86 million to more than $112 million. The prices of "name" artists, from Willem de Kooning to Eric Fischl and Jean-Michel Basquiat, were humiliatingly trounced, although a few -- Cy Twombly, Richard Diebenkorn -- saw new levels set for their work...
...contraction did not affect just contemporary art. In London last month a massively hyped auction at Sotheby's of a group of early Russian avant-garde paintings owned by the late George Costakis was a disaster, with major figures like Alexander Rodchenko and Liubov Popova falling to levels 25% to 50% under the low estimates. The worst debacle was experienced last week by the Manhattan auction house of Habsburg, Feldman Inc., whose offering of Impressionist and modern works (estimate: $35 million to $47 million) sold only eleven of 78 items for a total of $1.8 million...
What went wrong? Confidence. The sales revealed a buyers' backlash against controversial practices by the auctioneers, notably that of giving guarantees to owners in order to acquire works to sell. This technique -- which Sotheby's invented and Christie's denounced with high sanctimony in 1989, before quietly adopting it themselves in 1990 -- has produced a string of "pre-auction auctions" among the houses competing for merchandise. It means that the winning house, in order to fulfill its guarantee, has to pump its estimate higher and higher to hype expectation...