Word: marketeering
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...million and will not let it off the wall if insured for less. Even there, the problem is compounded by the auction houses: when consulted on insurance values or by the IRS, they tend to stick the maximum imaginable price on a painting to maintain the image of its market value and tempt the owner to sell...
...promoted into a Reagan-decade cathouse of febrile extravagance, where people in black tie and jewels applauded winning bids as though they were arias sung by heroic tenors, private dealers (at least those dealing in the work of dead artists) had less margin of resale to work with. Their market share today is still enormous, but the auction houses are after it, and it is shrinking...
...Christie's New York branch, he had reported selling two paintings that had not, in fact, found buyers at auction in New York: a Van Gogh at a supposed price of $2.1 million and a Gauguin at $1.3 million. Bathurst said he had lied to protect the art market from depression...
Sotheby's says its guarantee system is "traditional": it goes back 20 years. This is true, if only in the sense that the firm tried it in the '70s but it flopped, because the market was slow and pictures failed to sell. Loans, of course, have risks too. Christie's gives neither guarantees nor loans. "The practice of offering guarantees," argues a Christie's spokesman, "means that in effect you've bought the picture yourself. And loans by the auction house tend to create an inflationary situation, a false market...
...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...