Word: marketing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Tiffany lamp was not worth $3,000, and so on. One is left with the impression-indeed it is cultivated assiduously by the largest gaggle of public relations people ever to batten on the flank of culture-that art prices can only go up; the market has transcended its old uncertainty, whether the objects are million-dollar Titians or ten-buck trash "collectibles...
Fashion, in other words, is taken not to exist. But the unpleasant fact is that no reputation is immune to fashion. The art market is built on it. The French cattle painter Rosa Bonheur, a favorite of Victorian merchant princes, got ? 4,059 (then almost $20,000) for her Highland Raid in 1887; in 1952 it was resold for under ?200, or $560. Sir Edward Burne-Jones' Love and the Pilgrim, sold in 1898 for .?5,775 ($28,000), dropped to ?21 ($85) within less than 50 years. If artists who in their day were considered outstanding, whose work...
...wine industry in the early 1970s. A surge of investment in Bordeaux vintages, to some extent by people who could not tell Medoc from camels' urine, shoved prices so high that traditional consumers of claret switched to Italian and other wines, thus tearing the bottom out of the market...
...years and then reap a tax benefit by giving it to a museum at its enhanced value, fueled the art boom. The inequity of such laws has been that, if the artist gives his own work to the same museum in the same year, he cannot claim its fair market price as a write-off: all that the IRS gives him back is the cost of canvas and paint. The unfairness is compounded when the artist dies: the state then assesses the paintings in his estate at their highest market value and makes his heirs pay tax on that. This...
...million, is still "the two-million-dollar Rembrandt." It is removed, none too subtly, from all other Rembrandts. In the meantime, the clichés of art appreciation-"masterpiece," "genius," "deep humanity," "quality," "values" and the rest of that fustian-become, in the face of a spiraling market, a dead language, analogous to advertising copy and producing the same kind of knee-jerk reverence in a brutalized culture of unfulfillable desire...