Word: auctions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Warhol being the big exceptions. Merely to see his blond hair and round glasses across a crowded room, let alone hear his Yorkshire voice droning unstoppably on about Picasso, cubism and his own photography, turns the knees of collectors to jelly. When Actor Steve Martin pays $330,000 at auction for a medium-good, medium-size drawing of Andy Warhol by Hockney, as he did last month, one knows that some overriding program in the fame machinery has kicked in and will not soon be turned...
...Side was so cluttered with the fruits of his shopping binges that only two or three rooms were habitable. Picassos were stuffed in closets. Jewels were squirreled away in the canopy of his antique four-poster bed. "He was chronically, almost neurotically, acquisitive," writes Biographer David Bourdon in the auction catalog. "He was forever searching for that mythical five-dollar find that would turn out to be worth $1 million...
...original Bloomingdale's price tag of $20, and two other cheap cartoon watches sold for $2,640. "It's not the article, it's who it belonged to," explained Steve Taenaka, a hair stylist who bid $1,000 for a Mickey Mouse watch and lost. He settled for the auction's six-volume catalog, a relative bargain...
...diamond earclips signed by Salvador Dali fetched $55,000. Sotheby's termed Warhol's collection of more than sixty 18th and 19th century chairs, tables, beds, mirrors, desks, sewing tables -- and even a doorway -- "the most important offering of American classical and Federal furniture to be sold at auction in many years...
Proceeds from the auction -- after Sotheby's 10% commission -- will go to the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, established in the artist's will. And the foundation need hardly fear that Warholmania will fade after the final gavel. Also under way are major exhibits, movie retrospectives, books and the franchising of the Warhol name on a line of sportswear, watches, collector's plates and home furnishings. The marketing of the mystique seems perfectly natural in the case of a man who once declared, "Good business is the best art." Nonetheless, last week's inflated auction prices were "queasy...