Word: highes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Karl Marx would have understood their revolt. Just outside Leipzig's jumble of medieval churches and high-rises lies one of the most dismal landscapes in Europe. This is the heart of the rust belt: mile after mile of blackened smokestacks spew sulfurous coal smoke into the yellow sky; workers labor in ramshackle chemical and textile plants under Dickensian conditions of dirt and noise. To the east stretch crumbling tenements built 100 years ago; to the west sprawl ugly new developments virtually devoid of stores, cinemas or restaurants. Average monthly incomes would buy just $30 of goods in the West...
...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, codes and bids seemed mysterious and scary. Scratch your nose at the wrong moment, the urban folktale...
Loans to the buyer are made before the auction, and completed after it, at an interest rate that may go as high as 4% over prime. A common amount is 50% of the hammer price -- whatever the work reaches...
Sotheby's feels it is being arraigned for the crime of high success. David Nash, head of its Fine Arts division, told the Washington Post that critics, far from being elitist, have "a hostile proletarian attitude toward our business." (Let 'em eat Braque.) But auction-house pretensions to be self- regulating have collided with the skepticism of Angelo Aponte, New York City commissioner of consumer affairs...
Such events remind one that the art market in general, including the auction business, is not a profession. It is a trade, a worldwide industry whose gross turnover may be as high as $50 billion a year. Like other trades, it contains a large moral spectrum between dedicated, wholly honest people and flat-out crooks. It has never earned the right to be considered either self-policing or self-correcting. It needs regulation, but consumer affairs -- overburdened with the million complaints about small and large business violations that arise in New York, which it was created to deal with...