Maybe it was Oscar Wilde, the greatest Irishman since the blessed Brendan, who said it best: "One must have a heart of stone to read [Dickens' description of] the death of Little Nell without laughing." Much the same is true of the latest story to convulse the art world: the travails of the world's two biggest art-auction businesses, Sotheby's and Christie's, rivals that now stand accused by the U.S. Justice Department of colluding to rig the auction market by fixing their sales-commission rates. The art market, particularly in its auction form, has always been secretive, manipulative and repellently sanctimonious, preaching the "objectivity" of auction prices. Sotheby's and Christie's, dealers and collectors know, are all-powerful. "They are the auction market," says Howard Read of the New York City gallery Cheim & Read.
It had long been taken for granted that the art-auction business, like the art business generally, was immune to criminal investigation. Why? Because, you boring philistine, it was about noble and holy art. To stand on the podium and receive bids for a Rubens Crucifixion or a still life by Van Gogh, who died for our sins, was not like buying a vanload of AWOL television sets or a few vials of crack. But, of course, it is just another business. The auction market shifts more than $4 billion a year, and its two powerhouses, Sotheby's and Christie's, control 95% of that. For decades, rising to a climax just before the great art-market crash of 1989, Brits with pinstripe suits and faces like silver teapots have been flogging the benefits of art ownership to the rich on both shores of the Atlantic: art as investment, art as social elevation, art as confirmation of status, art as relic-hunting--the whole rigmarole that has actually done more to debase the real messages and values of art than anything else in our culture.
Sotheby's, with Christie's not far behind, has led the field in this enterprise of simoniac strip-mining. No excess, no necrophiliac vulgarity, was too great--the $54 million Van Gogh Irises that didn't really sell, the degraded spectacle of Americans hyped into bidding tens of thousands of dollars for gewgaws that once reposed in Jackie O.'s lavatory, the nitwits scrambling for sole and unimpeded possession of Marilyn Monroe's faded frillies. So for many, the idea that the mighty auction duumvirate should find itself humbled for any reason was almost too delicious to contemplate.
But that's what's on the table, in such plain view that Christie's last month ratted on Sotheby's by providing "information relevant" to the Justice Department, just weeks after Christie's chief executive, Christopher Davidge, abruptly resigned. Last week Davidge was followed by the two top officials of Sotheby's, A. Alfred Taubman, the chairman and largest individual stockholder who bought the firm in 1983 and took it public in 1988, and Diana ("Dede") Brooks, its chief executive. A replacement team was hastily assembled. Former Columbia University president Michael Sovern took Taubman's role as chairman, and William Ruprecht, managing director of Sotheby's North and South America, stepped in for Brooks.