Word: likes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...system of guarantees and loans. "It creates an immediate conflict of interest," says Julian Agnew, managing director of the London firm of Agnew's. "If the auction house has a financial involvement with both seller and buyer, its status as an agent is compromised. Lending to the buyer is like margin trading on the stock market. It creates inflation. It causes instability...
...happy from a legal standpoint," says Aponte. "O.K., Sotheby's says in its catalog that it offers financial services, but I'd like to see disclosure of the entire commitment. I would like to know if it is part owner of a painting, and if it has a fiduciary interest, I want to know what it is. If it lends Bond $27 million, I want that fact in the catalog...
...trade in volume and compete intensively for material, they can sometimes be an unwitting conduit for fakes, particularly in ill-documented but now increasingly expensive areas of art. Few forgers would be dumb enough to try to send a fake Manet, let alone a forgery of a living artist like Jasper Johns, through Sotheby's or Christie's. But where fakes abound, some will inevitably turn up at auction; and where millions of dollars abound, fakes will breed...
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...
...guess what kind of dealing structure will emerge from this mud wrestling in the '90s? Pessimists think the world contemporary art market, just like the communications industry, could implode into six or seven megadealers, each with an international corporate base formed by gobbling up aging or lesser competitors. The middle rank of dealers will have been squeezed out by the raids on their artists and stock, and at the bottom of the heap a litter of small galleries, treated as seedbeds by those on top, will be kept to service the impression of healthy diversity...