Word: millions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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 -- may not be equal to this task...
...does art-investment success have an upper limit? Is there a limit to demand? Economists Bruno Frey and Angel , Serna, in an excellent inquiry in the October issue of Art & Antiques, examine the case of Yo Picasso. Humana Inc. president Wendell Cherry, who bought it in 1981 for $5.83 million and sold it in 1989 for $47.85 million, got a "real net rate of return" (after commissions, insurance costs, inflation and so forth) of 19.6% a year. Handsome, but what about the new owner? If he sells it five years from now, the price must be $81 million before deductions...
This may be why so much of the auction action has shifted to contemporary art. It is a field that can still produce huge unsettling leaps of price that shake a market to its core, as publisher S.I. Newhouse's gesture of paying $17.7 million for Jasper Johns' False Start in New York a year ago proved. (It made sense, of a kind, for Newhouse to buy the Johns: he owns quite a few others, whose book value has accordingly multiplied...
...discreet dispersal of the huge collection formed, mostly after 1980, by the advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, whose London firm is now in difficulties. Saatchi bought in bulk, sometimes whole exhibitions at a time. He acquired, for instance, more than 20 Anselm Kiefers, whose prices are now past the $1 million mark, and at least 15 Eric Fischls, which are on or around it. Artists let him have the cream of their work because it was understood -- though never explicitly said -- that Saatchi would never sell; his collection would become a museum in its own right, supplementing the cash- strapped Tate...
...Italy's Sandro Chia when Saatchi dumped him -- as that new traders can move in and, by buying blocks from Saatchi, bypass the artists' dealers and force prices up out of all proportion to those of their new work. Robert Ryman, one of whose chaste minimalist paintings made $1.8 million at auction recently (gallery prices: from $50,000 to $300,000), now thinks it "unfortunate" that he ever let Saatchi have twelve of his prime works...