Denise Bethel of Sotheby’s at the presale exhibition of of the Polaroid Collection
At the press preview yesterday for Sotheby’s highly controversial upcoming sale, June 21-22, of selections from the Polaroid Collection, the director of the auction house’s photography department, Denise Bethel, fielded reporters’ questions about the dispersal of more than 1,000 works (presale estimate: $7.2-11.1 million), including more than 400 by Ansel Adams, that has been strongly opposed by some of the contemporary artists whose photographs are going on the block.
Bethel countered that other photographers are pleased to be in the sale. One of those, evidently, is David Levinthal, who participated in the Sotheby’s promotional video.
Ironically, the the most high-profile opponent of the sale, artist Chuck Close, has been tapped by Sotheby’s as its poster boy: His monumental “9-Part Self Portrait” (presale estimate: 40,000-60,000) is both the page-one image for the press release and the work that greets you, front-and-center, when you enter the presale exhibition:
Installation shot at Sotheby’s
On the CultureGrrl Video below, you’ll hear Bethel explain that Polaroid has been through two bankruptcies and that this sale is being conducted by court order (U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Minnesota), to help pay the creditors of Petters Group, Polaroid’s former owner. Its founder, Tom Petters, “was convicted in December of fraud and money laundering, among other
charges,” according to Carol Vogel‘s report last February in the NY Times. Warren Richey of the Christian Science Monitor later reported that Petters was sentenced in April “to 50 years in prison for carrying out a 16-year Ponzi scheme that
netted an estimated $3.7 billion.”
Charlotte Burns reported in April’s Art Newspaper that there had been talk among some of the photographers (who had given works to Polaroid in exchange for materials and equipment) about mounting a legal challenge to the sale. It now appears that no lawsuit has materialized. Sotheby’s spokesperson Lauren Gioia told me yesterday that no court papers challenging the sale had been filed. Critic and scholar A.D. Coleman has much more about this saga in numerous posts on his Photocritic International blog.
But for now, let’s listen to Bethel of Sotheby’s, double-teamed by me and Margot Adler of NPR. (My voice—closer to my recorder—is the louder of the two off-camera questioners.) In response to our queries, Denise compares the quality of the works selected for the sale (of which about 70% were made with Polaroid products, the rest with traditional cameras) with that of the thousands of works remaining in the Polaroid Collection. She also mentions the uncertain fate of those works not selected for auction and touches on the controversy over the dispersal. (The image you’ll see behind her is another work by Chuck Close.)
The person who intervenes at the end of this clip is Sotheby’s press officer Dan Abernethy, calling a halt to our interrogation: