Word: auctions
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Flocking to Australia's first major auction of the works of Portraitist (and TIME Cover Artist) William Dobell, eager Sydney art lovers anted up $116,730 for 36 paintings that Dobell himself had originally peddled for a total of $1,300. Conceding that "two-or maybe five-of them are pictures of which I am not ashamed," Dobell was nonetheless astounded at his new rating in the art market. His first reaction: "People must have more money than sense." As abruptly as he had jettisoned them three years ago, Monaco's absolutist Prince Rainier III, 38, restored...
...touch of whimsy in its stratagems for raising funds. Originally its gaiety appeared inappropriate: a preference for musicals composed by undergraduates but possessing few other virtues once nearly drove Grant-in-Aid out of business. Now they have settled for the solider stuff of Broadway musicals; they sponsor an auction of things forgotten and unclaimed; they even (alas) run the freshman mixer. Held against the grey formality of the Financial Aids Office, their fund looks filled with life and color; it is eminently worth preserving...
Slated to go on the auction block at London's Sotheby's in April were 34 impressionist and post-impressionist paintings (among the best known: Picasso's Death of a Harlequin) from the collection of Multimillionaire Storyteller Somerset Maugham, 88. Anticipated proceeds: upwards of $1,400,000, which, along with most of the rest of his estate, Maugham has earmarked for Britain's Incorporated Society of Authors, Playwrights and Composers to spare "needy authors from doing hack work...
...keep the market up for a particular artist, for example, a dealer may place a work on sale, then bid it up himself so that the price for that artist will reach a new plateau. In another dodge, dishonest dealers sometimes hold pre-auction conspiracies among themselves: they buy shares in a work that is scheduled for the block and select one of their number to bid on it while all the rest pledge themselves to remain silent. With the competition thus limited, the selected dealer gets the work at a low price. When he, in turn, sells...
...unless they happen to be conspiring to distort competition, dealers are likely to object to the fact that what appears to be free competition in the bidding is not really free at all. It is now standard practice in some auction houses to set a "reserve" on each work up for sale: if the bidding does not go beyond a certain price, the auctioneer simply pretends to accept a final bid and lets the work revert to the seller without his having to pay any commission to the house. Since other potential buyers have no idea of what the reserve...