When Is an Auction Record Not an Auction Record?

Can Christie’s claim a new auction record for a Qing Dynasty ceramic without appending a big asterisk, when the buyer turns out to be the consignor’s own sister?
Bloomberg reported that Alice Cheng was the Hong Kong auction’s winning bidder today, at $19.5 million, for the Qing porcelain bowl sold by her own brother, 80-year-old Hong Kong art dealer Robert Chang. The final price (which includes the buyer’s premium) trounced the top end of bowl’s presale hammer-price estimate, $7.8 million.
This brought to mind another Great Moment in Auction History, when a “record price” for contemporary art was set by Willem de Kooning‘s ”Interchange,” auctioned at Sotheby’s, New York, for $20.7 million in 1989. The only problem was, the dealers who won the bidding, Mountain Tortoise Company of Tokyo, couldn’t pay for it. Nonetheless, this dubious record continued to be trumpeted by the auction houses for years to come.