Putting a Price on a Chinese Vase
Arts writer and CultureGrrl blogger, Lee Rosenbaum, does an extraordinary job covering the intersection of the visual arts, museum culture, the art market, and politics. As a journalist, she’s not afraid of asking tough questions, challenging flimsy responses, and occasionally taking stances on controversial issues. In a recent posting (23 March 2011), she reports on the results of the New York Sotheby’s sale, Informing the Eye of the Collector: Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art from J.T. Tai & Co, in which a vase valued at $1000 sold for $18 million. The auction house presented the vase as “probably Republican” (early twentieth century) while seven bidders believed it to be something else altogether more important: a vase with the seal marks of the eighteenth-century emperor Qianlong.
It’s a potent example of what’s at stake in identifying an object. All seven bidders could certainly be mistaken, but regardless of who’s right, the discrepancies between their conception of the object and that of Sotheby’s is startling.
The posting is available here»
Enfilade 
These Chinese porcelain ‘Imperial’ vases are to the current market what Monets were to the 1980s – a fascinating ‘perfect storm’ of big money, big egos and the latest category of art objects to be perceived as ‘the best’.
Thanks, Emile, for the comment. It’s striking to see how much interest Qianlong seems to be generating — in terms of exhibitions and prices. In this particular case, I’m above all struck by the price discrepancy. To your point, I think it will be interesting to see what the market for such items looks like 20-30 years from now. -CAH
So this is a bit off-topic, but I’m intrigued by a new website ICorrect that allows users paying $1000 per annum to refute rumors or misinformation circulating about themselves (Sarah Lyall writes about the site in The New York Times, 27 March 2011). It’s not a fact-checking site, and so the information is not verified. Instead, its goal is simply to provide a forum for people to make their case, to present their side of the story as it were (browsing is free). Lots of current postings from famous users insist they’re not actually on Twitter. Something seems absurd to me about the site, but I’m fascinated because of the way it adds one more layer of referencing, indexing, &c. to the web as an information matrix. In terms of relating to the vase at auction, it’s another instance of there being multiple assessments, though of course they’re not all equally true. -CAH