Word: auctions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Sotheby's feels it is being arraigned for the crime of high success. David Nash, head of its Fine Arts division, told the Washington Post that critics, far from being elitist, have "a hostile proletarian attitude toward our business." (Let 'em eat Braque.) But auction-house pretensions to be self- regulating have collided with the skepticism of Angelo Aponte, New York City commissioner of consumer affairs...
Aponte's version is different. Consumer affairs found "gross irregularities" in art auction houses, he says. Chandelier bidding amounted to "an industry practice, both above and below the reserve." (A chandelier bid above the reserve violates present rules.) Aponte was also concerned about the practices of not announcing buy-ins and of keeping reserves secret. The auction houses held that if bidders knew what the reserve on a lot was, it would chill the market. Art dealers, lobbying the agency, maintained that the reserve should be disclosed and that bidding should start...
Because the auction houses trade in volume and compete intensively for material, they can sometimes be an unwitting conduit for fakes, particularly in ill-documented but now increasingly expensive areas of art. Few forgers would be dumb enough to try to send a fake Manet, let alone a forgery of a living artist like Jasper Johns, through Sotheby's or Christie's. But where fakes abound, some will inevitably turn up at auction; and where millions of dollars abound, fakes will breed...
...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...