Word: dead
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...auction firms also assiduously cultivate known collectors in the hope that, alive or dead, they will some day assign their possessions to the market: auction executives are among the world's most diligent readers of obituary pages. William Doyle, the ebullient Boston-Irish owner of a seven-year-old Manhattan house, who expects to gross $15 million this fiscal year, flies in his own plane to reconnoiter rumored treasures. On a trip to Warrensburg, N.Y., he found a trunkful of letters autographed by five of the signers of the Declaration of Independence...
...consuming interest: collecting French and American impressionists. "We've always been interested in art, and we'd always bought local artists," he explains. "Then, five or six years ago, we just had a yearning for artists who were names in books, fine art, artists who were dead...
...second flaw in the euphoric confidence of today's art traders is a matter of historical myopia. How wonderful, we are told, that all things rise in price, as though in some universal resurrection and canonization of the dead. Twenty years ago, you might not have got $1,000 for the Pre-Raphaelite painting that now fetches $100,000. The $30,000 Tiffany lamp was not worth $3,000, and so on. One is left with the impression-indeed it is cultivated assiduously by the largest gaggle of public relations people ever to batten on the flank of culture...
...painting from the flow of discourse about experience that art is meant to sustain, but it makes the price part of the subject of the work, separating it, by implication, from everything else ever painted by Velázquez, turning it from one painting among others into a dead whale on a flatcar, a curiosity to be gawped at. To most people visiting the Met, Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, bought amid vast publicity in 1961 for $2.3 million, is still "the two-million-dollar Rembrandt." It is removed, none too subtly, from all other Rembrandts...
This has been a vintage year for spies, real and imagined. In that second realm of entertainment, terrorists stalked the bestseller list, and every month new operatives peered from the dust jackets of international thrillers. Most of the books, of course, were time killers, for those who like it dead. But a few managed to cross the DMZ into the demanding arena...