Word: gogh
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...paid $39.9 million for Sunflowers? Less than two weeks after an anonymous telephone bidder set an art-world record at Christie's London auction house by buying the faded Van Gogh masterpiece, the mysterious party has come forward: Tokyo-based Yasuda Fire & Marine Insurance. Japan's second largest insurance company bought the work, which was completed in January 1889, to help celebrate its centenary next year...
What the eager art world saw at Christie's on Monday of last week, Van Gogh's 134th birthday, was less a market transaction than a quasi-religious rite. The house was being washed in the blood of Vincent, the Lamb of Modernism. (And none too soon, skeptics might say, since less than two years ago the president of Christie's, David Bathurst, had to admit that he had tried to rig the market by falsely announcing he had sold a Van Gogh and a Gauguin...
...frame made of flaky pastry, the colors rendered impasto furioso in various hues of saffron-tinted cream cheese, the green bits done in spinach, and detail added with studdings of seeds. It was cut up and eaten by the worshipers. No doubt when and if a major Van Gogh self-portrait comes on the block, there will be a distribution of marzipan ears...
...days later in a lakefront tent at the Hotel Beau-Rivage in Geneva, another event began: the sale of the late Duchess of Windsor's jewelry, organized by Christie's rival auction house Sotheby's. Here was a nominal contrast at least, since though everyone admires Van Gogh, none but a snob or a fantasist (not that we are short of either) could feel much nostalgia for Wallis Simpson and her husband, who abdicated the throne of England in 1936 and was obliged to spend the war years as governor of the Bahamas on account of his thinly veiled Nazi...
Stunned by last week' s record price for Van Gogh' s Sunflowers, the art world looks for reasons. But the sale -- no less than the $50 million auction of the Duchess of Windsor' s jewels -- is only a symptom of hype and greed. The public sense of art is demeaned as a wealthy entrepreneurial class fixates on "masterpieces" and private collectors drive museums out of the market...