Word: rare
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...value: 17th century old master drawings and prints; Victorian furniture, paintings, drawings, porcelain, silver and antiques of all kinds; Japanese pottery and porcelain, ivory and enamels; Italian baroque paintings and Renaissance statuary; American primitives; Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquities. Also upward bound are American Indian artifacts, antique gold watches, rare manuscripts, books and autographs, Victorian and Edwardian jewelry, and art deco furniture. It seems that nothing that can be collected is being neglected. Well, almost nothing. Among the few items that have not appreciably gained in value in recent years: Jacobean furniture and portraits by lesser English artists...
...audiences have changed, so have the mechanics of auctioneering. Twenty years ago, salesrooms were decorous, dusty-and dull. They were frequented mostly by dealers or agents for anonymous collectors. Save for the hobbyist or scholar who might attend a sale of arms and armor or rare folios, amateurs seldom bid for anything; mostly they were scared away. One intimidating aspect of auctions has been the seriocomic notion that by a cough or casual gesture the unwitting onlooker may become a high-rolling bidder. Only half in jest, Louis Marion, who headed the old Parke-Bernet firm and was the father...
People buy art for all reasons and with all incomes. Broadly, however, they fall into three categories: the amateur, who appreciates beautiful objects for their own sake; the investor, who is primarily intent on making money; and the rare great collector, who assembles treasures on the grand scale that enriches society. Three vignettes...
Nine of those ten years have passed, and the painting is still contaminated by the fallout from its price. The dance of digits in front of one's eyes renders the thing "special," isolated, fetishistically rare. It not only removes the painting from the flow of discourse about experience that art is meant to sustain, but it makes the price part of the subject of the work, separating it, by implication, from everything else ever painted by Velázquez, turning it from one painting among others into a dead whale on a flatcar, a curiosity to be gawped...
...reckonings, protons have a mean life of around 10,000 billion billion billion (10³-²) years (more than half of them will disintegrate in that time). Thus out of 10³-² protons, only one is likely to decay each year. The problem: how to detect that rare disintegration...