雅思阅读文章：The wizards of the Warhol market_雅思英语阅读

雅思阅读文章：The wizards of the Warhol market

　　At Phillips the highest price of the night was commanded by a 1963 Warhol portrait of Elizabeth Taylor titled Liz 5 . Steven Cohen, a hedge-fund manager, agreed to consign it to Phillips in exchange for a third-party guarantee rumoured to be from the houses principal owners, Leonid Friedland and Leonid Strunin . The painting sold at a hammer price of $24m hammer to a client on the phone. As it happens, the second-highest price in the Phillips sale was also a guaranteed Warhola large Flower painting, consigned by Jos Mugrabi, a dealer with a huge stock of Warhols. It sold on one bid to what could have been the same telephone buyer, this time for $8.1m. Did Messrs Friedland and Strunin acquire the top two lots in their own sale? Generally if a work sells on one bid, it sells to its backer.

　　These sales are no longer auctions, says Allan Schwartzman, an art advisor. To attract material at the top end, auction houses pre-sell the material to irrevocable bidders. They are deliberate, orchestrated events. Indeed, Christies evening sale featured 11 irrevocable bids, Phillips had ten, whereas Sothebys had only two. These deals spare the work the ignominy of being bought in, but they can create misleading benchmark prices that tend to flout ordinary rules of supply and demand. Guarantees can help auction houses by securing an important artwork around which an entire sale can be promoted. They may also appeal to a collectors gambling instincts. If he chooses to be the guarantor, he can either win the work or win a financing fee or both. Whatever the case, when the work sells on one bid, a guaranteed lot is effectively a private sale done in public.