Now – let it be known that virtually every day I get a heartfelt plea from J for me to portray her in a rather better light than that with which she is depicted in my daily blog postings.
‘People will think that all I do is shop, get my nails, hair and feet done and go to lunch’, to which I reply that virtually every day when one of her friends phones the house, that’s exactly what I have to say! I had to say, ‘nails’, yesterday. The day before I had to say, ‘shopping’ and today the answer was, ‘lunch’. I rest my case.
One day I will do a blog posting on her many good points but, (a) it will have to be heavily censored and (b) people will never believe me!
Last week however I was pleased, no, I was ecstatic, that she remained at home most of the time. Why? Well, the sale of the century was being held in Paris and it raised over €300 million (although other reports have it at €800m - why the discrepancy?) ….. and J wasn’t there to spend a cent. I bet her little purse was twitching in her handbag though. I thought at one stage that she had called Kitty, who just happened to be in Paris, to tell her to hot foot it across town to the Grand Palais and to stick her hand up and get some of Yves St Laurent’s items which are being auctioned by his partner (male partner – Yves was decidedly gay).
The auction was causing much comment over the last few weeks as it would be seen as a test of whether the credit crunch had hit the art market, but with some items going for 10-15 times their estimated sale price, the answer appears to be a definite ‘NO’.
Now, I have often wondered about the sense of paying several million for a piece of art but then the next time it is sold, the price has risen significantly, so it would appear that most original and collectable art is a good investment, but when an individual pays so much over the odds for a painting or a sculpture, is it such a good deal? Time will tell.
The items for auction in the Grand Palais was an almost entire life’s collection of every kind of art. There were paintings by Matisse and Degas, ancient artefacts looted from Beijng in 1860, furniture, some bits of sculpture and bits of rock – yup, bits of rock.
The prices achieved were stratospheric. An armchair, art deco in style and the only one made, was estimated to fetch €2m-€3m but actually sold for €21m! The Chinese sculptures, heads of a rabbit and a rat by an unknown artist, sold for €16m each when they were expected to raise no more than a couple of million between them. The prices being bid, and paid, staggered Christies’ staff which is saying something as it’s not unusual for a piece of art to significantly exceed its estimate, but for every item on sale (some several hundred items) to make more than expected is unheard of.
I suppose what grabbed my attention was the ‘bit of wood’, pictured above, which sold for an astonishing €26 million. Yup – that’s correct. Something you could find being ‘constructed’ by kids in just about every crèche or playgroup in the land, but was actually made way back in 1914 (!!!) by a Romanian sculptor ( more !!!), sold for €26 million.
Anyway, as I say, I am eternally thankful that J did not make it. She might have put her hand up for that awful chair thinking it was on offer for €21 instead of €21 million euros!
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