Estimate Upon Request

Felix Salmon submits:

As the big fall sales approach, chances are that one or two important works in each one will be marked in the catalogue with the cryptic notation "estimate upon request". In theory, what this means is that if you're very rich and you're interested in possibly buying the painting in question, you make an appointment at the auction house and they will smother you in soft-sell love before quietly imparting the kind of money you're going to need to shell out in order to buy the thing.

In practice, what this means is that you learn what the estimate is not from the auction house at all but rather from the New York Times.

"Estimate upon request" is an institution whose time has long since gone. It violates the principles of transparency which are the unique selling point of auction houses, and it carries with it outdated notions that one shouldn't attempt to put a price on greatness, at least not in public. (Of course, that's precisely what the auction houses are there to do.)

It's also a move which can backfire. Last year, Sotheby's put the "upon request" tag on ''Sinking Sun,'' a 1964 sunset by Roy Lichtenstein, and then whispered to the NYT's Carol Vogel that they expected it to sell for $20 million. In the event, there was only one bidder, who bought the painting for $15.6 million.

The fact is that we live in an age of instant gratification. If we see something spectacular, we want to know the price; we don't want to have to jump through hoops in order to find out. Yves Smith had a long post yesterday about a lake in upstate New York which is for sale, but then failed to mention the asking price. When I complained about this kind of teasing, I was told that selling big-ticket items is a bit like being a stripper: "you need to make people want what you have before you show them the goods."

These days, I don't think that's true any more. There is an increasing number of people who buy paintings precisely because they're expensive. Make the price as public as possible! Make it high enough, and you might even get onto one of those Forbes.com listicles about the most expensive this and that on the market. And there's no such thing as bad publicity.