Word: working
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...value when it is treated only as such. To lock it into a market circus is to lock people out of contemplating it. This inexorable process tends to collapse the nuances of meaning and visual experience under the brute weight of price. It is not a compliment to the work. If there were only one copy of each book in the world, fought over by multimillionaires and investment trusts, what would happen to one's sense of literature -- the tissue of its meanings that sustain a common discourse? What strip mining is to nature, the art market has become...
...laws, which destroyed most incentives for the rich to give art away. Tax exemption through donations was the basis on which American museums grew, and now it is all but gone, with predictably catastrophic results for the future. Nor can living artists afford to give their work to U.S. museums, since all the tax relief they get from such generosity is the cost of their materials. Thus, in a historic fit of legislative folly, the Government began to starve its museums just at the moment when the art market began to paralyze them. It bales out incompetent savings-and-loan...
...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, but the auction houses are after it, and it is shrinking...
...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...
Loans to the buyer are made before the auction, and completed after it, at an interest rate that may go as high as 4% over prime. A common amount is 50% of the hammer price -- whatever the work reaches...