Word: still
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...seller of a work of art and loans to the buyer. If X has a work of art that auctioneer Y wants to sell, Y can issue a "guarantee" that X will get, say, $5 million from the sale. If the work does not make $5 million, X still gets his check, but the work remains with the auction house for later sale. Guarantees are a strong inducement to sellers...
...over, say the auction houses (although Christie's may be wavering a little on the point, since it has no guarantee and loan system to defend). Probably not, say many dealers. But others think the idea is worth serious thought, though none believe it likely to happen while Washington still clings to the conservative catchword of deregulation. Besides, says Eugene Thaw, the doyen of U.S. private dealers, Sotheby's in particular may have enough political clout in New York to defeat a further tightening of the rules...
This may be why so much of the auction action has shifted to contemporary art. It is a field that can still produce huge unsettling leaps of price that shake a market to its core, as publisher S.I. Newhouse's gesture of paying $17.7 million for Jasper Johns' False Start in New York a year ago proved. (It made sense, of a kind, for Newhouse to buy the Johns: he owns quite a few others, whose book value has accordingly multiplied...
...kind of raider-dealer is exemplified by Larry ("Go-Go") Gagosian, who a few short years ago was selling posters out of a shopfront in Los Angeles but recently, with massive financing, tried (without success, according to dealing sources) to take over the estate of the senile but still living Willem de Kooning...
Japanese buyers may be aesthetically unsophisticated -- they buy names, not pictures -- but this will inevitably change. (It did in America, after 1890, while Europe was laughing.) The Tokyo market still has a weakness for yucky little Renoirs and third-string Ecole de Paris painters like Moise Kisling, whom nobody wanted a few years ago; one Japanese collector is the proud owner of a thousand paintings by Bernard Buffet. But the Japanese started going after bigger game about five years ago, and already the outflow is immense. Contemporary art has become, quite simply, currency. The market burns off all nuances...