Last February, a young American couple paid almost $30,000 for a small piece of stale cake. Nestling in a little, ribbon-tied box, it had been baked more than 60 years earlier to commemorate a wedding; there was no connection of any kind between this marriage and the cake fragment's purchasers, yet they considered their money well spent, later announcing "It is a lovely object . . . For us it is a piece of history." The couple, Benjamin and Amanda Yim spent, what one commentator called "an obscene amount of money" to buy this lot at the Windsor auction in New York, a nine-day disposal of the late Duke and Duchess's personal effects. Handled by Sotheby's, the sale was typical of such events in its heavy dependence on hyperbole and sentimentality.
Few of the 40,000-plus items included in the auction could claim much inherent value, but that scarcely impeded the auction house's publicity department. Association with the Windsors was sufficient to ensure more than $40,000 was paid for a pair of claret jugs (pre-sale estimate $2,000) and $7,000 for an old tartan suit. This is the reality of the auctioneering business today; provenance is increasingly the most important element driving a sale. Hence the popularity of celebrity auctions in which Elton John, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Britt Ekland and other variously well-known persons offload their extraneous possessions on impressionable members of the public. It began with the disposal of the deposed King Farouk of Egypt's personal collection in 1954 and led to a similar disposal after the death of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
The greatest of these upmarket jumble sales to-date was an auction conducted by Christie's in New York last June when a batch of Diana, Princess of Wales's old dresses sold for more than $3.25 million. One lot alone, a blue velvet evening dress by Victor Edelstein, made $222,500, the highest price ever paid for an item of clothing.
Barely two months later, the princess was killed in a car crash, thereby hugely increasing the value of the dresses sold. But buyer beware: an auction can offer no certainties and goods bought in this way are as vulnerable to fluctuations as any others.
During the previous decade, Irish art started to achieve unprecedented prices at auction and there was a rush to "invest" in painters who had previously not enjoyed especially high reputations. Unfortunately for many purchasers, the moment passed and prices declined. The notion of art as a commodity was particularly popular during the 1980s but collectors would appear to have become somewhat more cautious in their purchasing habits of late. What had briefly seemed like a good buy, frequently proved an expensive encumbrance.
If this was the case with art, how much more vulnerable to the vagaries of shifting fashion are the oddments of memorabilia which increasingly turn up at auction?
The problem for major auction houses is that the number of high-quality art works coming up for sale has steadily declined as more and more of them are acquired by museums around the world. In order to remain in business, auctioneers accordingly need to discover new collectables, whether they be 19th-century Scandinavian art - heavily promoted a few years ago - or the household chattels of dead royalty.
As the supply of works by major masters dries up, progressively more obscure painters will have to be promoted. The current edition of Sotheby's Preview, for example, has a feature on the late 19th-century Belgian painter AlfredEmile Stevens, an artist whose society oils would have been dismissed by discerning judgments earlier this century; it just happens that Stevens's Le salon du peintre - described as "a chef d'oeuvre of the artist's technique and a masterpiece of Impressionist interior painting" - is about to come up for sale shortly.
Also in the same Sotheby's Pre- view and also representative of changing circumstances are several pages of colour photographs demonstrating the efforts to which auction houses will now go to drum up business.
"People at Sotheby's" is not, as the title might suggest, an introduction to the various informed experts who work for the organisation, but a guide to recent social gatherings it has hosted. And quite a bizarrely-mixed bag they prove to be. Before the Windsor sale, for example, Sotheby's held a tea party in New York for pugs and their owners. The justification for this extraordinary gathering? The late Duke and Duchess were renowned devotees of these little dogs and included in the auction were a small group of objects relating to them. A half page of pictures is devoted to pugs surrounded by the Windsor furnishings. urstenburg; the models also happened to be wearing jewellery from a forthcoming Sotheby's sale.
ALL big houses must avidly court buyers, or as they are now termed, "clients". This is the reason why every sale of any note is prefaced by a succession of drinks parties and private viewings to which prospective purchasers are invited. Then there is the creation of departments with the title of "Client Advisory" designed to assist buyers, or those who might be potential buyers, in becoming familiar with the world of auctioneering.
The familiarity, of course, is highly selective, not least because auction houses must simultaneously service their vendors. While the latter look for the highest prices possible, purchasers obviously want to spend as little as is absolutely necessary while at the same time enjoying confidence that their new acquisition will increase in value. It is a difficult task and one the world's auction houses have achieved with varying degrees of success over the past few decades. At one stage during the 1980s, Sotheby's chose to offer buyers extended credit in order to encourage them to spend. This immediately raised a number of questions. If, for example, an auction house provides half the initial funds for a sale, how true is the eventual price achieved?
In November 1987, Australian tycoon Alan Bond bought Van Gogh's Irises for $49 million, making it the world's most expensive painting. It later transpired that the auctioneers had lent Bond 50 per cent of the purchase price and when his business empire collapsed, Sotheby's had to retrieve and resell the Van Gogh (along with a number of other pictures from the Bond collection) in order to get back its money.
The company's chief executive, Michael Ainslie, at one stage analysed the top 20 Japanese buyers at Sotheby's during the period 1984-1992 and discovered that 17 of them were either bankrupt, in jail or under investigation. Although there is no direct link between the fate of these purchasers and the auction house, Sotheby's could not but feel unhappy at what became of so many of their most prestigious "clients". The practice of lending money on bids was abandoned after a few years but it perfectly illustrates the ambiguity of an auctioneer's role. What might be considered a disaster for many people often turns out to benefit the auction house. The rise of Nazism, clearly threatening to the Jewish population of Germany, helped post-Depression Sotheby's and Christie's when the two companies were called upon both to sell a number of major private collections and give jobs to dispossessed antiques experts. Conversely, last winter's warm weather proved disadvantageous for the same companies since, as Sotheby's chairman of impressionist art bluntly pointed out recently, it meant "no dead collectors". A number of traditional practices which many auction houses worldwide engage in might best be described as questionable, such as the habit of taking imaginary bids "off the chandelier" - otherwise known as "bidding on behalf of the consignor" - in order to increase the eventual price of the lot being sold. Then there is "buying in" when a house, rather than admit defeat publicly should something fail to meet its reserve, sells to a fictitious bidder. Sometimes, the practice has been not just morally dubious but illegal.
Two years ago, Sotheby's old masters expert in Milan was captured on camera arranging to smuggle a painting to London, thereby evading Italy's laws on the export of works of art. Various excuses were put forward by the company once the employee's behaviour had become public: the painting was a very minor work by an almost unknown artist; it was worth little money; it had already been sold by Sotheby's London office and exported to Italy only months earlier. The fact remains, however, that in pursuit of a sale, a member of one of the world's leading auction houses was prepared to break the law.
Tricks of the trade tend not to be widely publicised even though every contemporary auction house depends heavily on publicity. The trade is simultaneously secretive and yet avid for attention, with the biggest companies running large public relations departments. In the same vein, auction houses are notoriously snobbish while being obliged to court all new clients. When Al Taubman took over Sotheby's in 1983, he told the staff in London that in his days as a customer nowhere else had he been treated so snootily.
Grand auction houses everywhere like to present themselves as bastions of good taste, discernment and old-fashioned civility. Sotheby's boards, like those of Christie's, are loaded with grandees including a Spanish royal highness, a marquess, an earl and a viscount. Their names give a suitably lofty impression to what is, when all affectation and pretence has been stripped away, just another branch of secondhand salesmanship.
Sotheby's: Bidding For Class by Robert Lacey is published by Little Brown at £20 in the UK.
