Another smart catalogue from Art + Object in the mail yesterday (it's their 50th auction) but this time round we had already looked through it a few days ago online, and the experience was just as good. How long can the paper version last? Hard to see why trees have to be cut down when the online copy is even more alluring than the paper one. Would people pay to get it online? Sure, if it arrived a few days earlier and came with a video backgrounder. Assume it would be cheaper too.
As to the line-up, it’s much as you would expect. Paintings by guys make up 75 percent of all the works with low estimates of $50,000 or over, although when you get to the $100,000 and over mark, Rita Angus and Frances Hodgkins push the female percentage up to 22.
Most left-of-field lot? Probably Ted Bullmore’s Astroform No 1 which comes from the same series as the Clockwork Orange work we posted on some time ago.
Best spurious provenance? Definitely, “Purchased by the current owner from the medical staff room in the Princess Margaret Hospital, Christchurch in 1963 on the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22 for twenty five pounds”.
Image: A+O catalogue showing Bullmore Astroform No 1 and right Ian Scott, Picasso and cubist man
