"Tres Personajes," the Rufino Tamayo painting found put out with the trash on a New York City sidewalk, sold yesterday for a little over one million dollars. It exceeded by a small margin Sotheby's high estimate.
But in the past few weeks, other highly-touted items have not sold.
One case is the Willamette Meteorite. And starting in late summer the papers were full of stories about one of Van Gogh's last paintings, "The Fields." Several articles I read made it seem as if it had been shut away in a closet and was now just seeing the light of day. But after it failed to sell, The New York Times, as well as other papers, suddenly disclosed that it had been shopped around for months. No one wanted it then, no one wanted it when it appeared at Sotheby's. (But if anyone's interested, it would certainly make my Christmas list.)
Next time I read about a highly-coveted item coming to auction, I'm going to think more about the PR machine behind the story. According to Forbes, the auction houses are only doing the best they can in a difficult situation:
"Auction executives are in a difficult position when setting pre-sale estimates. There's not an auction house in the world that wants to overprice what they sell. They know that to entice buyers, their pieces must be properly priced; but owners often demand a certain price, threatening to take their business elsewhere. As a result, auction houses are in constant competition to win business and are often forced to make promises they may wish they didn't have to make."
Before Ross Perot bought his copy of the Magna Carta it languished for sale. Now it, too, has had its share of stories circulating in late summer. The Magna Carta comes up for auction in December. Early estimates priced it at 20 to 30 million. It will be interesting to see if the hype translates into a sale.
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