Word: auctioner
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...sale in London in April 1989. It contained, according to some scholars, two outright fakes ascribed to Liubov Popova and one dubious picture, badly restored and signed on the front -- something Popova never did with her oil paintings. Doubts about the authenticity of these works were voiced to the auction house, but its staff disagreed and the sale went ahead...
Such events remind one that the art market in general, including the auction business, is not a profession. It is a trade, a worldwide industry whose gross turnover may be as high as $50 billion a year. Like other trades, it contains a large moral spectrum between dedicated, wholly honest people and flat-out crooks. It has never earned the right to be considered either self-policing or self-correcting. It needs regulation, but consumer affairs -- overburdened with the million complaints about small and large business violations that arise in New York, which it was created to deal with...
...there a case for setting up an independent regulator -- an art- industry Securities and Exchange Commission? Not before hell freezes over, say the auction houses (although Christie's may be wavering a little on the point, since it has no guarantee and loan system to defend). Probably not, say many dealers. But others think the idea is worth serious thought, though none believe it likely to happen while Washington still clings to the conservative catchword of deregulation. Besides, says Eugene Thaw, the doyen of U.S. private dealers, Sotheby's in particular may have enough political clout in New York...
This may be why so much of the auction action has shifted to contemporary art. It is a field that can still produce huge unsettling leaps of price that shake a market to its core, as publisher S.I. Newhouse's gesture of paying $17.7 million for Jasper Johns' False Start in New York a year ago proved. (It made sense, of a kind, for Newhouse to buy the Johns: he owns quite a few others, whose book value has accordingly multiplied...
...Sandro Chia when Saatchi dumped him -- as that new traders can move in and, by buying blocks from Saatchi, bypass the artists' dealers and force prices up out of all proportion to those of their new work. Robert Ryman, one of whose chaste minimalist paintings made $1.8 million at auction recently (gallery prices: from $50,000 to $300,000), now thinks it "unfortunate" that he ever let Saatchi have twelve of his prime works...