Word: reagan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Meissen jug or the not-quite-Rubens, by creating user-friendly expertise, the auctioneers defused this wariness. By the early '80s dealers were getting cut out of the game by collectors buying directly at auction. And by 1988, when the auction room had been promoted into a Reagan-decade cathouse of febrile extravagance, where people in black tie and jewels applauded winning bids as though they were arias sung by heroic tenors, private dealers (at least those dealing in the work of dead artists) had less margin of resale to work with. Their market share today is still enormous...
This indicates a radically transformed market structure. In art as in other markets at the end of Reagan's economic follies, America sinks and Japan rises. In this context it is fatuous to utter bromides about art's being the Common Property of Mankind. Americans now begin to view the outflow of their own art with bemused alarm -- just as Italians and Englishmen, at the turn of the century, watched the Titians, Sassettas and Turners, pried loose from palazzo and stately home by the teamwork of Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen, disappearing into American museums. "The Japanese are awash...
What do you say to an offer to ghostwrite Nancy Reagan's autobiography? "Just say yes," advised William Novak's wife Linda when Random House approached him a year-and-a-half ago. Today My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan has made headlines, sold some 400,000 copies and soared to the top of the best-seller lists. Yet if Novak went with a winner, so did Reagan. Novak, 41, came to the collaboration with credentials of his own. He is the golden mouthpiece of the nation's celebrities, a literary John Alden who can consistently...
Novak was prepared to dislike Reagan, assuming she was cold, authoritarian, power hungry. Yet, he says, "I never encountered that 'off with your head' woman I heard about. She's not Imelda Marcos, Leona Helmsley or Marie Antoinette, and some people still don't understand that." Over eight months, Novak taped 250 hours of conversation at the White House, in the Carlyle Hotel in New York City, at the Reagan ranch near Santa Barbara, Calif., and, of course, over the phone. Reagan offered candid recollections of the day her husband was shot, her hospitalization for cancer and her mother...
...talk about this,' I'd use the editors: 'But the editors insist on these subjects,' " says Novak. "The fact is, if you ask readers to pay $22 for a book, you have to reveal new material. Ironically, the better known the person the more they must reveal." Recalls Reagan: "There were tough, difficult times and good times. But I wanted it honest and personal...