At the end of my recent post on Third Party Guarantors and the “Tilted Playing Field”, I misleadingly suggested that Christie’s printed catalogues don’t disclose the fact that third-party guarantors may bid on the works they guarantee and that they receive financing fees from Christie’s, whether or not they are the winning bidders. (Sotheby’s says [scroll down] that its third-party guarantors are not allowed to bid on the works they guarantee, making the situation simpler.)
In my post, I stated the following opinion:
These arrangements (that there is a third-party guarantor who may be bidding and will receive a financing fee whether or not he is the purchaser) need to be fully disclosed on the pages for the affected lots in the printed catalogue, not merely announced at the sale and/or published in the online catalogue but not the printed one [emphasis added].
As Christie’s spokesperson Toby Usnik pointed out to me in an e-mail, the printed catalogues do contain language describing the details regarding its third-party guarantors (including the additional fact, which I neglected to mention in my last post, that guarantors may have knowledge of the otherwise confidential reserve). This elucidation, however, is NOT on the catalogue pages for the affected lots, as I argued ought to be the case for these unusual bidding conditions. The explanation is, instead, set forth in the fine print at the back of the catalogue.
If the auction houses want to be transparent, not obfuscatory, they should make these new, exotic variants on standard auction procedure easy to find and easy to read, as part of the entries for the affected works (as is, in fact, done in Christie’s online catalogue).
Does anyone remember the good old days when life and art sales were simpler, and auction results were regarded as a reliable measure of “fair market value,” defined as “a price arrived at between a willing buyer and a willing seller, neither being under any compulsion to buy or to sell and both having reasonable knowledge of relevant facts”?
At least CultureGrrl still has some willing donors who believe that I have reasonable knowledge of the facts: My warm thanks go out to Repeat Donors 132 and 133 from Solon, IA and Cleveland Heights, OH.
What I really need, though, is a third-party guarantor!