Buy faible, sell haute
January 30, 2019 7:07 AM   Subscribe

Making the Times-Sotheby Index; exposing art bidding deceptions: how Geraldine Norman (née Keen) built up the idea of art as an investment commodity and then fell out of favor with the auction system she'd abetted for trying to keep them honest.
posted by cortex (6 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
Haven't read it yet, but I assume this is going to need a #moneylaundering tag.
posted by tobascodagama at 7:55 AM on January 30, 2019


Well, the "bought-in" process sounds like it's probably being used in that way, but the article doesn't go into detail. Really interesting profile of Geraldine Norman, though.

Also, I like L.J. Olivier's style:
“One day, please God, the tide will turn. The air conditioned vaults of philistine businessmen will be broken open and the contents expropriated and your wretched art journalists will be stoned to death with fake Etruscan bronzes.”
posted by tobascodagama at 8:09 AM on January 30, 2019 [3 favorites]


art, comic books, baseball cards, i assume fidget spinners will be next

i wish we could have some sense of noblesse oblige still, the idea that someone wealthy should prove they aren't just thieves, i guess that's something we earn with a blade
posted by idiopath at 8:25 AM on January 30, 2019 [3 favorites]


Very cool!
posted by Secretariat at 8:38 AM on January 30, 2019


Fascinating. My first job out of college was for a startup, in 1990, which was attempting to provide subscription-based access to digitized records of global art-auction sales in order to provide an analytic means of access to the data for insurers and underwriters.

In 1990, the global art market had been dominated for a few years by blockbuster sales stemming from what up that moment was a hothouse market in Japan, and both US and international insurers - and loan originators - were scrambling for a way to provide non-bespoke valuations for held art, which would allow held art to be insured and used as collateral, thereby capitalizing it.

We attempted to accomplish this by subscribing to all the English-language art-auction results catalogs we could. The catalogs were then manually scanned and converted to ASCII before stuffing the data into databases. Unfortunately for us, most of the catalogs used Futura Light or another fine-boned sans serif font to report the sales results, and OCR software in 1990 was a pale shadow of itself today. I believe we ran the scanners on a Windows 1.x system; I remember excitement in the office when Windows 3.1 was released.

As a result, the data coming off the scanners was entirely unusable and had to be hand corrected several times. This drove the production costs outside the investors' tolerance and the business closed. I beleive the data assets and catalogs and so forth were eventually sold to Interactive Home Systems, the Bill Gates-funded precursor to Corbis. I suppose even if we'd succeeded it would only have produced a reporting service that would have laster about seven years - the data we were after is now all online, of course.
posted by mwhybark at 10:00 AM on January 30, 2019 [7 favorites]


Just fascinating! Over time I began to see how the exact same limitations laid out in the article affected the analytic value of the data we were gathering and was strongly encouraged to just keep trying to fix the OCR components. I don't think the investors necessarily didn't see that the data was bogus for good valuation but more were expecting to be able to find ways to resolve the holes in the data once a good corpus was available.
posted by mwhybark at 10:10 AM on January 30, 2019


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