News

The combined hammer prices for pre-war B-movie advertising posters at auction houses these days can easily exceed the budgets allocated by the old Hollywood studios to such downmarket films.

USA: SKINNER’S auctioneers of Boston have set up a new contemporary art gallery which could do for American artists what Maurice Saatchi has done for Damien Hirst and others.

…but Harrogate event will go ahead this month UK: LAST week Bailey Fairs Ltd went into voluntary liquidation but its principal, Robert Bailey, intends to continue organising in a limited capacity.

UK: THE Saatchi Gallery is to distribute 39 works of Contemporary Art by British artists among seven regional galleries and museums.

The William Foyle Library Pt. II sale at Christie’s, London last week revealed a copy of one of the rarest of all blockbooks.

UK: SUCH was the fine condition of this 3ft 3in (99cm) William and Mary oyster veneered walnut chest when it appeared at Clevedon Salerooms on September 2 that two bidders, one on the phone and one in the room, competed for it well beyond its £5000-7500 estimate.

While Thai and Chinese businessmen splashed out on bottles of Pomerol 61 and Romanee-Conti 85 in the years leading up to the crash of the Tiger economies in the late 1990s, Japanese captains of industry were impressing their corporate friends with equally expensive bottles of Scotch, which they would crack open after work and down in one sitting.