Word: sales
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...Within the art world, the announcement of Hirst's Sotheby's sale did not really come as a surprise. The last few years have seen a phenomenal increase in auction prices for contemporary art. Many of the buyers come from Russia, Asia and the Middle East, where a new class of billionaire collectors has emerged. It was none other than the royal family of Qatar that briefly made Hirst the most expensive living artist at auction last year by paying $19.2 million for Lullaby Spring, one of his medicine-cabinet pieces...
...Artists, however, don't ordinarily get a dime from auction sales of their work. The money goes to the sellers and the auction house. But where is the rule that an artist can't sell his own work at auction? And it was always likely that Hirst would be the first artist to do that. He has the production capacity to supply a big sale, the name recognition, and a relationship with Sotheby's that began four years ago with a London auction of just about everything that wasn't nailed to the floor at Pharmacy, a celebrity-magnet restaurant...
...Spin Cycle Complete Over the summer the Sotheby's sale - which has one of those wonderfully daft Hirst titles, "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever" - got the kind of presale treatment that Boeing and Airbus give the rollout of a new jetliner. In August a selection of the material was shipped for viewing to the Hamptons, the weekend retreat for New York millionaires. It also went to New Delhi, to wink at India's increasingly powerful collectors. In June Hirst flew to Kiev to attend a Paul McCartney concert and a party hosted by Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian steel billionaire...
...This may be another reason, apart from the impulse to explore new avenues, why Hirst has decided to throttle back production of the spin and butterfly paintings. The Sotheby's sale is also a canny way of getting his name out to new buyers. "There's our global reach," says Cheyenne Westphal, Sotheby's European chairman of contemporary art. "We're everywhere, and we act as a magnet for all the new people coming into the market." And a lot of those people might be more comfortable in an auction house - where anyone with cash can flex their muscles - than...
...Last year, Stephanie Rodgers, then a senior at Vanderbilt University, bought a brand new, international edition of a physics textbook for $75 on eBay instead of the $298 U.S. version for sale in the university's bookstore. The only difference between the two was the fact that the U.S. textbook was divided into three separate volumes, while the international version came as one book. Rodgers also purchased a $68 mathematical logic textbook ($130 new), which was nearly identical to her classmates' version except that it was paperback instead of hardcover. "Which is fine, because I prefer paperback," says Rodgers...