Word: onely
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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 it a standard policy to loan 50% against anything. We are not just lending against the object, but to an individual. At the time we loaned to Mr. Bond...
...code says that "if an auctioneer makes loans or advances money to consignors and/or prospective purchasers, this fact must be conspicuously disclosed in the auctioneer's catalog." But did this mean that Sotheby's put a note in the catalog of its November 1987 sale saying it had given one Alan Bond a loan of half the hammer price, repayment terms to be negotiated, on Irises? Think again...
...announcement in the catalog that it offers such financial services is enough to comply with the law. But its use to the buyer is nil -- and is meant to be. Disclosure might be chilling to other bidders. Or at least vulgarly explicit. Which auctioneers would rather die than be. One is not, after all, selling rusty tin Mickey Mice and kitchen chairs in a rented hall in Vermont...
...perestroika, is coming on the market in some quantity after 60 years of Stalinist-Brezhnevian repression. Prices are zooming, and authentication is thin. Sotheby's held a Russian sale in London in April 1989. It contained, according to some scholars, two outright fakes ascribed to Liubov Popova and one dubious picture, badly restored and signed on the front -- something Popova never did with her oil paintings. Doubts about the authenticity of these works were voiced to the auction house, but its staff disagreed and the sale went ahead...
Such events remind one that the art market in general, including the auction business, is not a profession. It is a trade, a worldwide industry whose gross turnover may be as 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...