'Reinventing the Bazaar,' by John McMillan, is a great and fun introduction to the wild variety and importance of markets throughout history and around the world. I finally understood how a Middle Eastern souk actually works economically and how to compare that to modern-day telecom-spectrum auctions. I love that book.
Adam Davidson
Women artists, no matter how well recognized they are, are seldom given solo exhibitions or featured in significant group shows. They are never top-ranked in auction choices.
Agnes Gund
I really love muscle cars. I don't think people might realize that about me. I really want to go to an auto auction and blow my life savings on a Camaro. They have such design around them, such panache.
Alex Guarnaschelli
Auctions typically are an opportunity for you to be able to acquire what you're looking for at a lower price; typically, the auctioneer sets the opening price at much lower than the retail price and certain interest develops and as more people come in it drives the price up.
Alexander Gilkes
I always have my lucky gavel in case I have to do an auction on short notice.
A great friend and mentor, Simon de Pury, invited me to be auctioneer at Phillips de Pury, which was a great honor.
Our gutsy view of the world is that with time, there will be three auction houses: two serving the upper end of the market and Paddle8, serving the middle market.
I'm a bit of a vault of secrets. I'm a victim of English reserve, which is slightly in contrast to how I communicate when I auction.
I started my career at LVMH and then I joined Phillips de Pury under the tutelage of Simon de Pury as second auctioneer and head of marketing.
Some prescient American collectors, including Vicki and Kent Logan and Mera and Donald Rubell, began collecting Chinese art before 2000 with a genuine passion, but as the auction prices exploded everyone was beating a path to the galleries and artist studios in China. It became the 'China thing.'
Arne Glimcher
When Robert Benton was doing the movie 'In the Still of the Night,' I'd choreographed the auction scene and supplied the paintings and had a bit part - I was bidding against Meryl Streep.
One of the questions that I hear over and over and over is, 'What do we do with all these paintings we do on television?' Most of these paintings are donated to PBS stations across the country. They auction them off, and they make a happy buck with 'em.
Bob Ross
My assistant says I'm an eBay auction waiting to happen. I have a very large collection of T-shirts... about 4,000 now. Maybe I'll pillage it someday. I have resisted the offers to do a line of T-shirts.
Bruce Vilanch
Today, somewhere in America, more foreclosures. More auctions. Another farmer plots his own death. And another. There is an art to making your death by combine look like an accident.
Carolyn Chute
My first memory of flipping a house was when I was pregnant with my daughter Taylor. We bought a condo in Santa Ana, and I think we paid around $120,000. It was really exciting because when we went to auction, it was the first property we went to bid on and we won it.
Christina Anstead
I've auctioned off many scripts and will continue to do so for good causes.
Claudia Christian
I purchased a 1955 Rolls-Royce that my wife liked because it was new the year we were married. Then came a 1926 Hispano-Suiza Cabriolet that I bought at my first classic car auction after I had three martinis. As more cars were added, I had to buy a warehouse.
Clive Cussler
I was driving by an auto auction one day, and they were auctioning off a beautiful Hispano-Suiza. I started bidding even though I hadn't even signed up with the officials. The last bid was $50,000, and it was mine. And I thought, 'My God, what have I done? I've never spent more than $500 in my life.' That was the first one.
I try to avoid the 'art world' as much as possible. It's too much about fads and fashions - who's getting the best prices at auction and things like that.
Cornelia Parker
It's a great advantage to be able to play people off against each other, isn't it? You go to Christie's and get a quote on something. And then you go to Phillips' and you tell them what Christie's has given you. I like auctions for artists.
Damien Hirst
I think there are a lot of honest people doing honest business on online auctions. But the control on these Web sites is pretty minimal.
Is Amazon truly the best online buying experience? Absolutely not. Is eBay the best platform for auction? Probably not. Are dating sites like match.com really a reflection of the way people date? Probably not.
In 2007, Donald Trump spent $20,000 that belonged to his charity - the Donald J. Trump Foundation - to buy a six-foot-tall portrait of himself during a fundraiser auction at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida.
Public buildings, built from the rates and taxes paid by past generations, are being auctioned off by impoverished councils who need the money to pay the redundancies of workers they can no longer afford to employ. Many of these grand Victorian buildings will be turned into flats that most people will never be able to afford.
With 'California,' editors were reading it, and fast, and others were emailing my agent to request it. Ultimately, there were a few editors interested in the book, and it sold at auction about two weeks after the submission process started. I couldn't believe it!
When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people.
I'm not a big TV guy, but I love either 'Auction Hunters' or those repo shows on truTV. It's really just glorified 'Jerry Springer' is all it is. Every now and then, it's just mindless entertainment. We'll be on the bus, and we'll laugh at it. Those are my guilty pleasures.
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
Hermes bags are the only bags that auction houses accept. Given that it's already valuable to begin with, making it into an even special one of-a-kind piece by painting on it can only increase its value.
The auctioneer is talking for both people, and that's the big revelation about, 'Oh, that's what they're doing.' They're just doing it very fast, so you could kind of miss on that. He's speaking for you, because people in the crowd don't have a voice, so that's what really makes it compelling.
An auctioneer is such a uniquely American thing. I keep thinking in my head, perhaps it's not as American as I think, but it feels so Southern. It feels so American. Like, hundreds of years of American tradition is involved in it.
Despite all the Internet has done to make prices transparent and bibliographic information universal, you can still find - at book sales and thrift shops, auctions and even fancy dealers - unrecognized or underpriced rarities. Getting something valuable for cheap is the basic, greedy thrill of book collecting.
I used to save all my rejection slips because I told myself, one day I'm going to autograph these and auction them. And then I lost the box.
In Naples, Fla., I met a self-made man, a multimillionaire, whose round penthouse apartment is home to Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Henry Moore, and Mickey Mantle. He had purchased the most coveted items auctioned by the Mantle family at Madison Square Garden in December 2003.
My father used to run auctions. He's now a singer in the Canary Islands.
There is no better feeling than doing well while you are doing good. If you really want to meet the nicest, most caring people in your field, get involved with charity work. The thankless hours that go into planning charity dinners, running a carnival, and gathering donations for silent auctions are noticed and appreciated.
I am currently doing about 30 charity auctions a year.
A saboteur in the house of art and a comedienne in the house of art theory, Lawler has spent three decades documenting the secret life of art. Functioning as a kind of one-woman CSI unit, she has photographed pictures and objects in collectors' homes, in galleries, on the walls of auction houses, and off the walls, in museum storage.
I hate art auctions.
Auction houses run a rigged game. They know exactly how many people will be bidding on a work and exactly who they are. In a gallery, works of art need only one person who wants to pay for them.
Now people look at 'The Scream' or Van Gogh's 'Irises' or a Picasso and see its new content: money. Auction houses inherently equate capital with value.
I don't know much about auctions. I sometimes go to previews and see art sardined into ugly rooms. I've gawked at the gaudy prices, and gaped at well-clad crowds of happy white people conspicuously spending hundreds of millions of dollars.
I started collecting in the late 1990s. My first purchase was from an auction, a scroll by Dong Qichang, from the early 16th century, the late Ming Dynasty.
One of these days, when I get tired of it all, I'll keep six guitars and the amps I'm using, and I'll have a big old auction for charity.
For the surf idol Duke Kahanamoku portrait, which I created for the Surfrider Foundation, I took a photo from a book cover and abstracted the photo image into a drawing. This drawing was laminated onto a surfboard and auctioned to a buyer.
I love collecting things from auction - we Brits really are hoarders and collectors.
Let's say you need a perfectly obedient servant who never gets tired, never needs to be paid, and is virtually indestructible. If you're in a galaxy a long time ago and far, far away, you'll just fly off to the local droid auction and pick up one of those shiny gold models with lovely manners.
Natural resources must be so distributed, by way of auction or otherwise, that they serve a larger public purpose.
I had a novel in the back of my mind when I won an Ian St James story competition in 1993. At the award ceremony an agent asked me if I was writing a novel. I showed her four or five chapters of what would become 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' and to my surprise she auctioned them off.
Everything I commission - whether it is for me or for a client's home or for a hotel or office - is absolutely unique to that job. I have everything made, or I find vintage and antique pieces at markets and auctions.
