Word: coulds
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There are, according to Sotheby's CEO Michael Ainslie, about 500 people alive today who might fork out more than $25 million for a work of art. Au Lapin Agile could go, said rumor, to $60 million. But in the end, publishing magnate Walter Annenberg bought it for $40.7 million, and two or three people clapped. It was the third most expensive work of art ever sold at auction...
...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, of course...
...insurance? When the Metropolitan Museum of Art's show "Van Gogh at Arles" was being planned in the early '80s, it was assigned a global value for insurance of about $1 billion. Today it would be $5 billion, and the show could never be done. In the wake of Irises, every Van Gogh owner wants to believe his painting is worth $50 million and will not let it off the wall if insured for less. Even there, the problem is compounded by the auction houses: when consulted on insurance values or by the IRS, they tend to stick the maximum...
...years, changed its business to such an extent that its lending and other investment services generated $240 million in 1988 -- nearly a tenth of Sotheby's gross income of $2.3 billion. What Taubman saw (and staider Christie's was not slow to pick up) was that an auction house could go directly to the public, not only at low price levels but also at very high ones. In the past, auction houses sold mainly to dealers, who put on their markup and then sold to their clients. People were shy of going to auctions; the whole apparatus of reserves, attributions...
Julian Agnew, the London dealer, believes that "outside regulators could create as many problems as they solve -- they may not know the market well enough. Ideally, self-regulation is better. But if a dominant firm stretches the unwritten norms of the past, ((self-regulation)) may not be enough...