Word: millions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Guarantees can backfire. Sotheby's guarantee on the recent four-day sale of the collection of John T. Dorrance Jr., the late Campbell's soup heir, nearly did so. According to ARTnewsletter, a trade sheet, the dealer William Acquavella offered the Dorrance estate a guarantee of $100 million, but Sotheby's trumped him with $110 million. Though the sale realized a total of $131.29 million, it did so only because Sotheby's had persuaded the heirs to accept a "global reserve" (the minimum price acceptable to the seller on the whole collection), instead of placing a reserve, or minimum...
...falsifying an auction. In 1985 David Bathurst admitted that four years earlier, when he was president of 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...
...auctions themselves and the ethics of the trade -- is giving guarantees to the seller of a work of art and loans to the buyer. If X has a work of art that auctioneer Y wants to sell, Y can issue a "guarantee" that X will get, say, $5 million from the sale. If the work does not make $5 million, X still gets his check, but the work remains with the auction house for later sale. Guarantees are a strong inducement to sellers...
Criticism of auction-house guarantees and loans has been particularly widespread in the past few weeks, ever since it was disclosed that Sotheby's had lent Australian entrepreneur Alan Bond $27 million in 1987 to buy what became the most expensive painting of all time, Van Gogh's Irises. But Sotheby's defends its policy as right, proper and indeed inevitable. Guarantees are given "very sparingly," CEO Ainslie said last week. "It is unusual for more than one or two paintings in a sale to be guaranteed." Ainslie rejects any comparison to margin trading. "We do not make...
...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...