What's a work of art worth? The simple answer is: whatever the market will bear.
I know that. You know that. So does art journalist Peter Watson, who somewhat belatedly fills in the details about what we already know in "Sotheby's: The Inside Story," an absorbing if slightly breathless account of shady goings-on inside one of the world's most prestigious auction houses.
Smuggled art, stolen art, art with questionable provenance - Sotheby's sells it all, Watson charges. And not because it's good, or important, or even beautiful, one might add, but simply because what the market will bear these days is quite a lot.
Part spy thriller, part true-crime story, Watson's book recounts his decade-long attempt to uncover a mystery art historians and curators have long been puzzled by but only reluctantly have examined: Given the strict export controls many countries imposed a generation ago to prevent speculators from plundering their national treasures, how was it that so many foreign artworks regularly turned up on the auction block in cities like New York and London?
The short answer is that the overheated economy of the 1980s produced a frenzy of speculative buying in which too many dollars were chasing too few works of art.
People with more money than taste or good sense - let alone any real understanding of what they were buying -all of a sudden were willing to spend enormous sums at least partly in the expectation that the value of whatever they bought could only go up.
The dirty little secret of the art world is that it operates on a herd mentality, though Watson alludes only obliquely to this. The art world responds to power and money, not beauty. In a hotly contested auction, pride, envy and vanity are the driving forces. The art itself is just a marker for distinguishing between winners and losers. If two egomaniacs want the same painting, the one with more money will surely get it, purely as a matter of personal prestige.
In the '80s, every ambitious New York lawyer had to have a Dutch old master in his condo, never mind the quality. Dentists bought contemporary sculpture; accountants and insurance underwriters accumulated portfolios of prints. People who had made fortunes on the stock market squandered them on mediocre Impressionist paintings for no other reason than that they had seen one on their hostess' wall at a dinner party.
Suddenly everything was collectible - American furniture, English porcelain, old master drawings, vintage photographs, Swiss watches, Asian art, antiquities. The size and value of one's collection was as important as an indicator of social status as it was of aesthetic expression.
So everybody was buying, buying, buying. But there was never enough to go around. There are only so many Rembrandts and Renoirs and Picassos that come up for sale, after all. Most of the best are already in museums.
Auction houses like Sotheby's were making a fortune selling second-, third- and even fourth-tier artists. Critics, art historians and curators kept busy "discovering" previously overlooked masterpieces - and still the voracious maw of fashion wailed for more.
What to do? Ingenious criminal cliques took to scouring remote rural parishes in Italy for local minor masters. Altarpieces disappeared, along with communion cups, candelabra, crucifixes, incense miters. Anything remotely old was fair game.
One clever con artist offered to "restore" the musty paintings hung high on a wall of an Italian village church. He took the images down, cleaned them - then copied them. The forgeries were returned to the church - with the connivance of the priests - while the originals were spirited out of the country for auction in London or New York.
Another gang made a bundle looting Italian tombs. Backhoes would arrive in the middle of the night to dig up the site, and the next morning truckloads of sarcophagi, ceramics and jewelry would be carted off in broad daylight. Somehow the carabinieri rarely caught up with them.
All this swag eventually wound up, through routes as circuitous as they were secretive, in the respectable homes of foreign gentry who neither knew nor cared where it came from. After all, they had bought it legally. One man's loot becomes the next man's heirloom.
Illicit trade
Watson vividly re-creates these tawdry scenarios, along with the milieu of crooks, con men, couriers, cutouts and thugs who make up the shabby underworld of smuggled art. His coup was to connect convincingly the dots between the illicit trade and the posh salons of "legitimate" dealers like Sotheby's, whose cut of the take added tens of millions in profits to their bottom lines.
Perhaps the best that can be said of these commercial elite is that they turned a blind eye to what surely they must have known was a criminal enterprise. At worst, they were willing conspirators who flouted the law in order to enrich their company and themselves.
