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Aponte's version is different. Consumer affairs found "gross irregularities" in art auction houses, he says. Chandelier bidding amounted to "an industry practice, both above and below the reserve." (A chandelier bid above the reserve violates present rules.) Aponte was also concerned about the practices of not announcing buy-ins and of keeping reserves secret. The auction houses held that if bidders knew what the reserve on a lot was, it would chill the market. Art dealers, lobbying the agency, maintained that the reserve should be disclosed and that bidding should start at it.
The result was a dragged-out battle between the auctioneers and consumer affairs. The auctioneers won that round, but Aponte is getting set for another. Stiffer rules are pending, including those governing loans. The current consumer affairs code says that "if an auctioneer makes loans or advances money to consignors and/or prospective purchasers, this fact must be conspicuously disclosed in the auctioneer's catalog." But did this mean that Sotheby's put a note in the catalog of its November 1987 sale saying it had given one Alan Bond a loan of half the hammer price, repayment terms to be negotiated, on Irises? Think again.
Sotheby's has never said anything specific about its loans in its catalogs, or given any information on its guarantees except that they exist. To Sotheby's, a mere announcement in the catalog that it offers such financial services is enough to comply with the law. But its use to the buyer is nil -- and is meant to be. Disclosure might be chilling to other bidders. Or at least vulgarly explicit. Which auctioneers would rather die than be. One is not, after all, selling rusty tin Mickey Mice and kitchen chairs in a rented hall in Vermont.
"I am not happy from a legal standpoint," says Aponte. "O.K., Sotheby's says in its catalog that it offers financial services, but I'd like to see disclosure of the entire commitment. I would like to know if it is part owner of a painting, and if it has a fiduciary interest, I want to know what it is. If it lends Bond $27 million, I want that fact in the catalog."
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.
The growth area for forgery today is the work of the Russian avant-garde -- Rodchenko, Popova, Larionov, Lissitsky, Malevich -- which, as a result of perestroika, is coming on the market in some quantity after 60 years of Stalinist-Brezhnevian repression. Prices are zooming, and authentication is thin. Sotheby's held a Russian sale in London in April 1989. It contained, according to some scholars, two outright fakes ascribed to Liubov Popova and one dubious picture, badly restored and signed on the front -- something Popova never did with her oil paintings. Doubts about the authenticity of these works were voiced to the auction house, but its staff disagreed and the sale went ahead.