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Yet, unless they happen to be conspiring to distort competition, dealers are likely to object to the fact that what appears to be free competition in the bidding is not really free at all. It is now standard practice in some auction houses to set a "reserve" on each work up for sale: if the bidding does not go beyond a certain price, the auctioneer simply pretends to accept a final bid and lets the work revert to the seller without his having to pay any commission to the house. Since other potential buyers have no idea of what the reserve is, they are at a tremendous disadvantage; the price has in a sense been rigged against a low price before the sale even begins. Of all the great auction houses, Parke-Bernet probably has the best record in keeping the bidding free, but the competition from abroad could well force it to change its ways. Recently Parke-Bernet began to permit sellers to buy back underbid works without paying a full commission. When it went after the Erickson collection, it had to compete with Sotheby's guarantee that the auction would bring a certain amount. Parke-Bernet dislikes the whole idea of guarantees; it got the job only by cutting its own commission.
How Dealers Work. Auctions sketch in the main outlines of art's price picture; it remains for dealers to shade in the details. The best dealers are men and women of experience and taste, heavily relied upon by the richest collectors—the Mellons, Morgans, Huntingtons, Fricks, Wideners and Kresses of the past, and the Rockefellers, Onassises, Fords, Lehmans and Chryslers of the present. History's most famous dealer was Joseph Duveen, who before his death, in 1939, sold art to many of the major collectors of London, New York and Paris. It is said that Lord Duveen spent a fortune in tipping ships' stewards to make sure that his deck chair would be put alongside that of the multiest of the multimillionaires on the passenger list. At one time, he is reputed to have had on salary a battalion of butlers who would duly report from the best homes of Britain and America any tips they might pick up on who might be ready to sell another heirloom. Duveen also had a wicked way of dealing with his competitors. Once, when a High Church duke asked him to take a look at a religious painting he was considering from the rival firm of Thomas Agnew & Sons, Duveen blandly said: "Very nice, my dear fellow, very nice. But I suppose you are aware that those cherubs are homo sexual." As Duveen's biographer S. N. Behrman tells it, the painting went back to Agnew's forthwith.