Department of Impossible NY Times Auction Corrections

I’m sure that many of you interrupted your Thanksgiving revels yesterday to see that the NY Times actually did run a correction to Carol Vogel‘s article that had misidentified purchasers of works at Sotheby’s contemporary sale. But I just got back into the CultureGrrl newsroom this afternoon, and discovered that this correction (scroll down) had slipped into the paper while I was otherwise engaged:
Because of an editing error, an article on Saturday about the outcome of the big fall art auctions in Manhattan misidentified the buyer of “Hanging Heart,” a sculpture by the artist Jeff Koons that was sold at Sotheby’s on Nov. 14. Although speculation about the buyer’s identity centered last week on the Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad, Mr. Broad says he did not purchase the work.
Apparently “speculation about the buyer’s identity” had also centered on Steve Cohen as supposed purchaser of the Bacon “Bullfight” and Laurence Graff as suspected acquirer of the Koons “Diamond (Blue).” But those misapprehensions, also given currency in Vogel’s article, remain uncorrected.
As I’ve already noted, an informed source close to Steve Cohen told me unequivocally on Wednesday that the hedge fund mogul did not bring home the Bacon.
And this just in from Penny Weatherall, personal assistant to jewelry magnate Laurence Graff:
I can tell you that Mr. Graff was not the buyer of the Jeff Koons “Diamond (Blue).”
But will the Times ever correct the incorrect impression befuddling its readers about Cohen’s and Graff’s purported purchases? Probably not. Unlike Broad, who, in Carol Vogel‘s report, “took home” Koons’s “Hanging Heart” (language that the correction ascribes to an “editing error”), the other two collectors were only “thought to have” or “said to have” bought their respective non-acquisitions.
This contretemps inevitably brings to mind another purported purchase—Mexican financier David Martinez‘s Vogel-reported outlay of $140 million for Pollock‘s ”No. 5, 1948,” sold by David Geffen. Vogel stubbornly stood by her story, despite explicit denials by Martinez. At that time, I gave her the benefit of the doubt that her unnamed source was, in my words, probably “reliable and…in a position to know the truth about the transaction.”
Before passing on any more information to us from anonymous sources, Vogel should reread her newspaper’s own policy, which I also quoted in my post a year ago on the Martinez fracas.
The Times’ Confidential News Sources Policy states:
Whenever anonymity is granted, it should be the subject of energetic negotiation to arrive at phrasing that will tell the reader as much as possible about the placement and motivation of the source—in particular, whether the source has firsthand knowledge of the facts.
Perhaps Vogel’s source(s) for the auction story should have been described as someone who “declined to be identified because he was providing misinformation.”