Word: collectors
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Auction has transformed the very nature of the art sale. In 1983 the old English firm of Sotheby's was taken over by A. Alfred Taubman, American conglomerator, real estate giant and collector. The deal had to be approved by Britain's Monopolies and Mergers Commission. At the commission hearings, Taubman declared that he would be "very concerned" if the public ever got the idea that Sotheby's was centered anywhere but Britain, and that the "traditional nature of the business and of the services offered would be changed as little as possible." Request approved...
...dealers of the traditional sort will actually come to power, so that the tradition that stretched from Ambroise Vollard to Leo Castelli and Paula Cooper will be lost. Big dealers will have their tame resident critics, as princes their poetasters. There will no longer be much distinction between collectors and dealers, and the collector-as-amateur will be extinct. On the boards of many museums, a new breed of broker, the collector-dealer-trus tee, will hold sway. And art will keep draining out of America toward Japan and Europe. Welcome to the future: a full-management art industry. Most...
...names, not pictures -- but this will inevitably change. (It did in America, after 1890, while Europe was laughing.) The Tokyo market still has a weakness for yucky little Renoirs and third-string Ecole de Paris painters like Moise Kisling, whom nobody wanted a few years ago; one Japanese collector is the proud owner of a thousand paintings by Bernard Buffet. But the Japanese started going after bigger game about five years ago, and already the outflow is immense. Contemporary art has become, quite simply, currency. The market burns off all nuances of meaning, and has begun to function like computer...
Kirk Varnedoe, MOMA's director of painting and sculpture, confesses that he (like most of his colleagues) is haunted by the image of the big collector looking at his Van Gogh over the fireplace, the picture that, like thousands of others in America, was promised to a museum -- as Irises had been. "At one time," muses Varnedoe, "he might have looked at it and said, 'Well, there's the Porsche I didn't buy.' Now he says to himself, 'That's my children's education for three generations, a villa in Monte Carlo, a duplex on Fifth Avenue...
...holding company through which Bond owned the picture -- defaulted. The auction house rejected this proposal. In late 1988 Bond himself reportedly tried to pass off Irises to the New York megadeveloper Donald Trump as partial payment on a $180 million deal for the St. Moritz Hotel. Trump, no collector, said the painting was worth only $30 million and turned him down...