Word: past
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...nearly a tenth of Sotheby's gross income of $2.3 billion. What Taubman saw (and staider Christie's was not slow to pick up) was that an auction house could go directly to the public, not only at low price levels but also at very high ones. In the past, auction houses sold mainly to dealers, who put on their markup and then sold to their clients. People were shy of going to auctions; the whole apparatus of reserves, attributions, codes and bids seemed mysterious and scary. Scratch your nose at the wrong moment, the urban folktale went, and -- yikes...
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...
Julian Agnew, the London dealer, believes that "outside regulators could create as many problems as they solve -- they may not know the market well enough. Ideally, self-regulation is better. But if a dominant firm stretches the unwritten norms of the past, ((self-regulation)) may not be enough...
...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...
Sean Scully's prices through his regular dealer David McKee have jumped from $90,000 to $140,000 in the past six months, but Scullys are trading on the secondary market as high as $350,000, and Saatchi recently unloaded a block of nine of them on the Swedish dealer Bo Alveryd, who last month spent $70 million at three London galleries (Marlborough, Waddington and Bernard Jacobson) before moving on to the New York fall auctions. There he underbid the $20.68 million De Kooning and bought, among other things, a Johns for $12.1 million. "I thought Saatchi had good intentions...