Word: trading
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Guarantees can backfire. Sotheby's guarantee on the recent four-day sale of the collection of John T. Dorrance Jr., the late Campbell's soup heir, nearly did so. According to ARTnewsletter, a trade sheet, the dealer William Acquavella offered the Dorrance estate a guarantee of $100 million, but Sotheby's trumped him with $110 million. Though the sale realized a total of $131.29 million, it did so only because Sotheby's had persuaded the heirs to accept a "global reserve" (the minimum price acceptable to the seller on the whole collection), instead of placing a reserve, or minimum...
...auction practice that has attracted the most criticism lately -- and goes to the heart of the nature of auctions themselves and the ethics of the trade -- is giving guarantees to the 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...
Because the auction houses trade in volume and compete intensively for material, they can sometimes be an unwitting conduit for fakes, particularly in ill-documented but now increasingly expensive areas of art. Few forgers would be dumb enough to try to send a fake Manet, let alone a forgery of a living artist like Jasper Johns, through Sotheby's or Christie's. But where fakes abound, some will inevitably turn up at auction; and where millions of dollars abound, fakes will breed...
Such events remind one that the art market in general, including the auction business, is not a profession. It is a trade, a worldwide industry whose gross turnover may be as high as $50 billion a year. Like other trades, it contains a large moral spectrum between dedicated, wholly honest people and flat-out crooks. It has never earned the right to be considered either self-policing or self-correcting. It needs regulation, but consumer affairs -- overburdened with the million complaints about small and large business violations that arise in New York, which it was created to deal with...
...Japanese investment has been peculiar for several reasons. One is that Japanese corporations are less open to American governance than American companies are to Japanese control. Also, Japan has been less than effusive in welcoming U.S. goods. Then too, no U.S. bureaucracy compares with Japan's Ministry for International Trade and Industry, an entity whose principal mission, some commentators believe, is to plot Japan's economic domination of the world...