Word: laurentic
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...Sale of the Century, as it was called, was held at Paris' Grand Palais, and it was not a sale at all but an auction of the art collected by the late iconic French designer Yves Saint Laurent and his business and former life partner, Pierre Bergé. It's understandable if you want to dismiss the hundreds of millions spent on someone else's stuff as just another example of clueless extravagance in an age of thrift. But for those with means, there was something else for sale, as valuable and just as likely to drive a person to irrational...
During his 45-year career, Saint Laurent changed everything about the way women exist in public life. He introduced them to a universe of color and dared them to adopt a male silhouette, revolutionizing the way men see women and women see themselves. To own a piece of art or an object collected by Saint Laurent, who helped define an aesthetic for the 20th century, gives new meaning to provenance...
Taste is a disappearing commodity. Today a Russian oligarch or a Park Avenue hedge-fund manager might still have the bucks to buy Saint Laurent's Matisse, but the real investment is in something far scarcer: Saint Laurent's eye, his love of beauty and mannerisms and the exotic dream world within which he lived. As Christie's Giovanna Bertazzoni said of the viewing, which was open to the public, "it gives ordinary people the experience of what it might be like to actually own works of this quality." Perhaps the greatest and last gesture of good taste came from...
...pictures from throughout Yves Saint Laurent's life...
...unique calculation, driven as it's said by the incalculable "price of two people's desires." Surprisingly, the only disappointment on Monday was that a late Cubist work by Picasso - Musical Instruments on a Table, which had the highest presale estimate, of some $30 million - went unsold. The Saint Laurent-Bergé auction continues on Tuesday and Wednesday with the sale of rare furniture and antiquities, including two Chinese animal heads that Beijing says were pilfered and must be returned to China. Earlier on Monday, a Paris court rejected China's bid to stop the sale...