Word: fining
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...rest of the West, once listless salesrooms thrum with auctiophiliacs in search of a piece of the past; the top firms hold several simultaneous sales a day six days a week. In 1979 Sotheby's and Christie's, the two London-based giants of the international fine arts auction business, together have netted $702 million worldwide. Nor does anyone expect recession to cool the fever. Some indicators...
American folk art, however humble its origin, is soaring in value as well-crafted objects like pewter pots, duck decoys, quilts and scrimshaw (erotic examples in particular) become ever scarcer. Photographs are commanding fine arts prices; an original print of Ansel Adams' Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico sold last week for a record $22,000. "We can see the day when a single photograph will fetch $100,000," says Philippe Garner, a Sotheby's photographic expert. Almost any object from the once scorned 19th century now seems as precious as Suez Canal Co. stock was in its heyday. Twenty...
Over the past six months, such objects as ivory and jade pieces and antique silverware have all recorded huge price increases at auction. Among several categories of fine arts that experts believe to be underpriced but rapidly appreciating in value: 17th century old master drawings and prints; Victorian furniture, paintings, drawings, porcelain, silver and antiques of all kinds; Japanese pottery and porcelain, ivory and enamels; Italian baroque paintings and Renaissance statuary; American primitives; Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquities. Also upward bound are American Indian artifacts, antique gold watches, rare manuscripts, books and autographs, Victorian and Edwardian jewelry, and art deco...
...been only in the past decade or so that the big sales have been covered by the press as Events; the sums paid for art used to be buried in newspapers along with ship arrivals. Now, with the tremendous increases in fine arts prices and the expansion of public interest, big auctions have become flash bulb and video-tape fiestas. To a large extent the transformation has been wrought by Sotheby's, the world's largest, canniest and most aggressive house. In the late '50s Sotheby's introduced such techniques as international telephone hookups, bidding...
...been the couple's 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...