Word: buys
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...coal smoke into the yellow sky; workers labor in ramshackle chemical and textile plants under Dickensian conditions of dirt and noise. To the east stretch crumbling tenements built 100 years ago; to the west sprawl ugly new developments virtually devoid of stores, cinemas or restaurants. Average monthly incomes would buy just $30 of goods in the West; "luxuries" ranging from women's shoes to oranges and shampoo are routinely unavailable in the dingy shops...
Only $40.7 million. And was that less or more than the GNP of a minor African state? On the other hand, wouldn't it buy only the undercart of a B-2, and maybe the crew's potty? Or a dozen parties for Malcolm Forbes? That a night's art sale could make a total of $269.5 million and yet leave its observers feeling slightly flat is perhaps a measure of the odd cultural values of our fin de siecle. "Personally," said Ainslie a week before the sale, "I would like to see more price stability -- at present levels...
From the point of view of American museums, the art-market boom is an unmitigated disaster. These institutions voice a litany of complaints, a wrenching sense of disfranchisement and weakness, as their once adequate annual buying budgets of $2 million to $5 million are turned to chicken feed by art inflation. "There are many areas where museums can no longer buy," says James Wood, director of the Art Institute of Chicago. "It's bad for the museums, but it goes beyond that. It's bad for the country." The symbol of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's plight...
...wider and less tangible than this. Quite rightly, MOMA's Varnedoe rejects the idea that "there was some mythical period, now lost, when art was seen only as the shining purity of aesthetic experience. As long as there has been art to sell, art has been something to buy." But he, like many others, is worried by "the crazy sense of disproportion in the world that puts an extra glow on the art object...
Criticism of auction-house guarantees and loans has been particularly widespread in the past few weeks, ever since it was disclosed that Sotheby's had lent Australian entrepreneur Alan Bond $27 million in 1987 to buy what became the most expensive painting of all time, Van Gogh's Irises. But Sotheby's defends its policy as right, proper and indeed inevitable. Guarantees are given "very sparingly," CEO Ainslie said last week. "It is unusual for more than one or two paintings in a sale to be guaranteed." Ainslie rejects any comparison to margin trading. "We do not make...