pivotal（关键的）
position in the international art world. Even though the company can pick and choose what information it wants to reveal, it has in fact become more open over the past ten years.

Sotheby’s, for its part, is still smarting from the public beating it received in America nearly a decade ago when its chairman, Alfred Taubman, and its chief executive, Diana Brooks, were found guilty of conspiring with Christie’s to fix commissions（固定佣金）. Mr Taubman served ten months of a one-year prison sentence; Mrs Brooks was given six months’ house arrest, a $350,000 fine and 1,000 hours of community service. No one was charged at Christie’s, which had blown（吹）
the whistle on the commission-fixing. Sotheby’s lives in fear of the regulators and discloses only as much financial information as it has to.

In the decade since the scandal both auction houses have concentrated on expansion. Sotheby’s was the first auctioneer to become interested in Russia and remains bigger there than its rival（对手）. Christie’s, which has long been especially strong in the Far East, has put a lot of effort into China. Foreigners are not allowed to own auction houses there, but Christie’s has got around that by signing a licensing agreement with a leading Chinese auctioneer. Both houses have their eye on the Middle East. Christie’s holds regular auctions in Dubai, of which its art and jewellery sales are the most successful. Sotheby’s has opened an office in Qatar which is important for its relationship with the Qatar royal family, one of its biggest clients.

The response of both auction houses to the current slump（暴跌，不景气）
has been broadly similar: staff cuts, unpaid leave, a squeeze on salaries, slashed marketing and travel budgets（旅游市场营销和削减预算）, and an edict（法令） that the glossy（光辉的，有光泽的） auction catalogues（目录）, which in the boom（繁荣） cost each of them £25m a year to produce, were no longer to be handed out（分发） like chocolate drops.

With a hugely expanded international client base, it was only a matter of time before both auctioneers started to muscle in（强行加入） on areas that had previously been the preserve of private dealers, matching buyers and sellers and selling new art rather than items that had already been in the market. Sotheby’s proved to be much the more ruthless（无情） of the two. All the lots in Mr Hirst’s September 2008 sale, for example, had been consigned to Sotheby’s directly from the artist’s workshop, which shocked dealers who had not previously thought of the auction houses as direct competitors.

In 2006 Sotheby’s paid $56.5m for Noortman Master Paintings, a leading dealer in Old Masters. Less than a year later Christie’s bought Haunch of Venison, another high-profile（外形，轮廓）（高调） dealer set up in 2002, whose founders included a former director of Christie’s contemporary-art department. Noortman gave Sotheby’s an entry into the Maastricht Art Fair（博览会）, the pre-eminent dealers’ fest（卓越的经销商巨星）, and Haunch of Venison helped make Christie’s Mr Pinault the biggest art trader in the market. Both galleries operate independently of the auction houses, but the relationships are close.

All things to all men（对什么人说什么话，八面玲珑）

Both auction houses have also put a lot of effort into advising buyers on how to improve their collections. As Jussi Pylkkanen, Christie’s European president, says, “We’re much more than an auction house now.” The recession has made many collectors nervous about offering their treasures at auction, so they are selling them privately（私人的，背地的）. In 2007 Christie’s chalked up（记下） private sales of $542m and Sotheby’s of $730m, which means the two auction houses are now among the world’s biggest private dealers. Both often get calls like the one Sotheby’s recently took from a Moscow collector with $2m to spend on an “optimistic” Chagall oil, “not too feminine” and no more than a metre in height. “We put out the word and immediately received several offers from our offices in London, Geneva and New York,” says Mikhail Kamensky, the firm’s head of CIS business.

In 2007 private deals accounted for 8.7% of Christie’s business. Mr Pylkkanen expects that figure to go up to 20% of its revenue within three years. That should put the wind up（使…害怕） private dealers.

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作者: zhengchangdian    时间: 2009-12-20 22:45

本帖最后由 zhengchangdian 于 2009-12-22 17:05 编辑

A special report on China and America

A wary(小心，谨慎) respect

Oct 22nd 2009 From The Economist print edition


America and China need each other, but they are a long way from trusting each other, says James Miles.

“OUR future history will be more determined by our position on the Pacific facing China than by our position on the Atlantic facing Europe,” said the American president as he contemplated the extraordinary（非凡的） commercial opportunities that were opening up in Asia. More than a hundred years after Theodore Roosevelt made this prediction, American leaders are again looking across the Pacific to determine their own country’s future, and that of the rest of the world. Rather later than Roosevelt expected, China has become an inescapable part of it.

Back in 1905, America was the rising power. Britain, then ruler of the waves, was worrying about losing its supremacy to the upstart. Now it is America that looks uneasily on the rise of a potential challenger. A shared cultural and political heritage helped America to eclipse(蒙蔽) British power without bloodshed, but the rise of Germany and Japan precipitated(促成，加快) global wars. President Barack Obama faces a China that is growing richer and stronger while remaining tenaciously authoritarian（顽强的专制）. Its rise will be far more nettlesome than that of his own country a century ago.

With America’s economy in tatters（碎片） and China’s still growing fast (albeit not as fast as before last year’s financial crisis), many politicians and intellectuals in both China and America feel that the balance of power is shifting more rapidly in China’s favor(对...有利). Few expect the turning point to be as imminent as it was for America in 1905. But recent talk of a “G2” hints at a remarkable shift in the two countries’ relative strengths: they are now seen as near-equals whose co-operation is vital to solving the world’s problems, from finance to climate change and nuclear proliferation(扩散)
Choose your weapons

Next month Mr Obama will make his first ever visit to China. He and his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao (pictured above) stress the need for co-operation and avoid playing up their