Word: market
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...becoming ever more scarce, as the auction catalogues-if not the sales figures-sadly reflect. The prizes go mostly these days to citizens of nations that do not extract excessive taxes from the wealthy: Switzerland, France, West Germany, Japan and the Arab countries. Americans remain very much in the market, however, thanks in part to U.S. tax laws that permit a collector to deduct contributions from his taxable estate if he has willed his treasures to a museum. The museums of America, Western Europe and Japan have at their disposal millions of dollars for acquisitions. The biggest spenders: France...
...auction firms also assiduously cultivate known collectors in the hope that, alive or dead, they will some day assign their possessions to the market: auction executives are among the world's most diligent readers of obituary pages. William Doyle, the ebullient Boston-Irish owner of a seven-year-old Manhattan house, who expects to gross $15 million this fiscal year, flies in his own plane to reconnoiter rumored treasures. On a trip to Warrensburg, N.Y., he found a trunkful of letters autographed by five of the signers of the Declaration of Independence...
...canniest and most aggressive house. In the late '50s Sotheby's introduced such techniques as international telephone hookups, bidding by closed-circuit TV, the gala evening sale crammed with formally clad celebrities, assiduous ballyhoo and greatly increased sale schedules. More recently, Sotheby's pushed its mass-marketing strategy even further by signing an agreement with Tokyo's Seibu Department Stores Ltd., which brings the Western fine arts auction market into retail stores and enables Japanese buyers to place bids for, say, an over-the-counter Constable. When Wilson retires as Sotheby's chairman in February...
...artworks for investment. Though Sotheby's insists that the arrangement contains sufficient built-in checks and balances to dispel any suspicion of conflict of interest, many people in the art world are skeptical of any deal whereby an auction house may in effect end up supporting its own market. Says David Bathurst, Christie's New York president: "Using art as an investment scares the hell out of me. There's going to be a flood of money in and out, leaving a sound market devastated because of people who shouldn't have been there...
There are some kinds of success, the painter Edgar Degas once remarked, that are indistinguishable from panic. So it seems with the present boom in the art market. For the past 15 years or so, collectors, dealers, auction houses and their willing accomplices, journalists, have been moved to pleasure, then wonder, and now to a sort of popeyed awe at the upward movement of art prices. If art was once expected to provoke un nouveau frisson, a new kind of shudder, its present function is to become a new type of bullion. Thus, we are told by art industry flacks...