Auction Indiscretion: The Not-So-Confidential Reserve

One paragraph leaped out at me from the long article by Greg Allen in tomorrow’s NY Times “Arts & Leisure” section about art-auction protocol:
“Let me put it this way,” said Tobias Meyer, worldwide head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s. “If I were in the luxurious position of spending a large sum of money on art, I would like to have as much information as possible.” That means building a rapport with the auction house’s specialists, who can provide crucial details about a work’s condition, its unpublished reserve price (the lowest price a seller will accept) and what Mr. Meyer called “the level of interest in a work”: who else is bidding and what they might pay.
Flag on the play: If auction houses are providing some potential bidders with information about the supposedly undisclosed level of the reserve, they are violating their duty of confidentiality to sellers. And if they are slipping information to favored buyers about who else may be bidding and for how much, they are violating their responsibility to maintain the confidentiality of conversations with potential bidders.
The premise behind auctions is that they provide a level playing field for the participants. Providing the advantage of inside information a favored few would be a violation of that premise and of the trust put in auction houses by buyers and sellers.