Word: publicness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...longer expect to match the standards of just a few years ago." To Paul Mellon, long the Maecenas of Washington's National Gallery of Art, "everything important is ridiculously expensive . . . I just refuse to pay these absurd prices." And as the museum's buying power fades, public experience of art is impoverished, and the brain drain of gifted young people from curatorship into art dealing accelerates...
...their materials. Thus, in a historic fit of legislative folly, the Government began to starve its museums just at the moment when the art market began to paralyze them. It bales out incompetent savings-and-loan businesses but leaves in the lurch one of the real successes of American public life, its public art collections...
...inflated market is also eroding the other main function of museums: the loan exhibition. Without a doubt, the past 15 years in America have been the golden age of the museum retrospective, bringing a series of great and (for this generation of museums and their public) definitive exhibitions, done at the highest pitch of scholarship and curatorial skill: late and early Cezanne, Picasso, Manet, Van Gogh, Monet, Degas, Watteau, Velazquez, Poussin, up to MOMA's current show of Picasso's and Braque's Cubist years and, perhaps, Seurat to come...
...English firm of Sotheby's was taken over by A. Alfred Taubman, American conglomerator, real estate giant and collector. The deal had to be approved by Britain's Monopolies and Mergers Commission. At the commission hearings, Taubman declared that he would be "very concerned" if the public ever got the idea that Sotheby's was centered anywhere but Britain, and that the "traditional nature of the business and of the services offered would be changed as little as possible." Request approved...
...such an extent that its lending and other investment services generated $240 million in 1988 -- 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...