Word: likes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Japanese buyers may be aesthetically unsophisticated -- they buy names, not pictures -- but this will inevitably change. (It did in America, after 1890, while Europe was laughing.) The Tokyo market still has a weakness for yucky little Renoirs and third-string Ecole de Paris painters like Moise Kisling, whom nobody wanted a few years ago; one Japanese collector is the proud owner of a thousand paintings by Bernard Buffet. But the Japanese started going after bigger game about five years ago, and already the outflow is immense. Contemporary art has become, quite simply, currency. The market burns off all nuances...
Kirk Varnedoe, MOMA's director of painting and sculpture, confesses that he (like most of his colleagues) is haunted by the image of the big collector looking at his Van Gogh over the fireplace, the picture that, like thousands of others in America, was promised to a museum -- as Irises had been. "At one time," muses Varnedoe, "he might have looked at it and said, 'Well, there's the Porsche I didn't buy.' Now he says to himself, 'That's my children's education for three generations, a villa in Monte Carlo, a duplex on Fifth Avenue...
...Like many another entrepreneur, Bond had never given much thought to art until he got rich. "This Pie-casso, now," he asked an Australian museum man over dinner in Sydney in the early 1980s, "is he worth having?" But a major impressionist collection was what Bond hankered after. He knew this could not possibly come cheap. He didn't care. He was, in short, a dealer's dream: Billionaris ignorans, a species now almost extinct in the U.S. but preserved (along with other ancient life-forms) in the Antipodes...
...market was going like the Wabash Cannon Ball through 1988 and 1989, Bond's own finances were not. His bid for Irises had been part of a consistent pattern: paying far too much for investments even though they were, as assets, sound. In 1987 he paid more than $700 million for Kerry Packer's TV stations in Australia. In the financial year ending last June, Bond's media firm posted a $34 million loss. Also in 1987, Bond paid more than $1 billion for the U.S. brewery G. Heileman, whose 1989 resale value is about half that...
...opinions were expressed through his stories." He arrived at the White House carrying a bag of Mrs. Fields chocolate chip cookies, Nancy Reagan's favorite. When he met her at the Reagan ranch, where she is known to favor jeans, he showed up in jeans. "Bill's like a great character actor," says Peter Osnos, his editor at Random House. "His self-effacing quality allows his subjects their own expression. An extraordinary quality of intimacy with the person is conveyed...