Sale-rooms
It's down to the punters now
Alistair McAlpine
M ay is usually the month when the desks of dealers are piled high with sale- room catalogues, but not this year — nor for that matter last year or even the year before. Nowadays the pile of catalogues of forthcoming sales will barely rise in height above the rim of a glass filled with cham- pagne. The sale-rooms are changing: the quantity of goods for sale is just not there, the buying frenzy of the 1980s is over, sales of important Impressionist and Modern paintings and sculpture which formerly boasted catalogues the size of the interna- tional telephone directory now make do with what look more like slim volumes of poetry. Mega-sales of French furniture are as rare as the goods themselves and Orien- tal porcelain is now sold almost exclusively in the Far East.
Gone are the days of the early Sixties when Sotheby's on a Friday morning would have held sales with lots as disparate as icons and violins, sales that only dealers attended, where the auctioneer ploughed endlessly on through carpets and furniture, long past a respectable time to eat lunch, desperately trying to elicit bids for a very mixed set of chairs from a very mixed set of dealers, many of whom sat on the very fur- niture the auctioneer was trying to sell. These were men in middle age who remembered the war years, when the sale- rooms would amalgamate several lots to get one bid for them, men unconvinced of the new boom in antiques.
Gone too are the days when the sale- room became the venue for a new specta- tor sport: watching the extremely rich pay vast sums of money (or, as it has subse- quently turned out, often someone else's money) for paintings. The sale-rooms were an indispensible part of society life, their great galleries equipped with internal tele- vision so that those who only warranted a seat in an annexe could see what was hap- pening. There were ranks of telephones for overseas bidders, ranks of reporters waiting to report the latest record price, great bou- quets of flowers, the cost of which would pay the salary for a year of the lady who cleaned up the next day, and the audience, bejewelled and dinner-jacketed, kissed and kissing in a wild melee of greeting. Each sale brought higher prices, each high price brought more goods for sale, and those who bid would be petted and pampered by the sale-rooms, their every eccentric whim catered for.
Lord Gowrie recalls those days at a Sotheby's sale in New York. A painting of waterlilies by Monet, a large one, was sell- ing; then the bidding was held up for a noticeable amount of time. One of the con- tenders, a member of Sothebys' staff, was briskly relaying bids from a client on the other end of her telephone. The auctioneer looked towards her with concern: instead of bidding she appeared to be in heated conversation. Then, to his relief, she start- ed bidding again. She acquired the Monet for her client at a cost of $8 million. After- wards Grey Gowrie asked her what the problem had been. The client had been uncertain whether the painting would real- ly go with her curtains: 'I had to reassure her as to its exact colour.'
Nowadays, the sale-rooms have a differ- ent sort of client. The society hostess has gone, the dealers who are left are cautious and it is only the punters who really buy. These are the true collectors, gripped with the urge to buy — but to buy only that which specifically fits in with their own col- lection. All else is of no interest to them.
They include the collector who bought a 200-year-old piece of Tibetan cheese at Sothebys and was prepared to pay £920 for it, the man who frequently rings Bonham's for news of Staffordshire figures of St George and the Dragon, but only St 'Brace yourself, it's affectation time.' George and his Dragon, the people who collect badges once used in Butlins holiday camps and those morbid collectors who buy the death plaques of soldiers killed in action, paying a premium for those of sol- diers killed on the first day of a battle.
True collecting is not about taste, only about the desire to own: to own the beauti- ful and the obscure, the rare or even the totally tasteless. Collectors do not care: when they see the lot that fits into their collection they have no alternative but to buy it. And, since sale-rooms exist to sell things, such punters are the new focus of their attention.
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