[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][12.19]

番茄斗斗UID：2720914

动词-结构-生词-表达
1.All but two pieces sold, fetching more than £70m
2.It was a last hurrah
3.file for bankruptcy
4.The world art market had already been losing momentum for a while after rising vertiginously since 2003.
5.especially in New York, where the bail-out of the banks coincided with the loss of thousands of jobs and the financial demise of many art-buying investors.
6.Contraction：a reduction in business activity or growth
7.bounce back
8.Last year China overtook France as the world’s third-biggest art market after America and Britain
9.in partnership with Western institutions
10.Straddling all areas of the art market is a handful of individuals who have emerged as the key figures in the art world in recent years
11.hedge-fund ：an investing group usually in the form of a limited partnership that employs speculative techniques in the hope of obtaining large capital gains
12.The popularity of blockbuster art exhibitions and the emergence of buyers with a different cultural history have helped change tastes
13.take the lion’s share
14.Come to light
15.quoted company;Christie’s was taken private
16.pivotal position
17.Sotheby’s, for its part, is still smarting from the public beating it received in America nearly a decade ago
18.No one was charged at Christie’s, which had blown the whistle(to call public or official attention to something (as a wrongdoing) kept secret ) on the commission-fixing
19.The response of both auction houses to the current slump has been broadly similar: staff cuts, unpaid leave, a squeeze on salaries, slashed marketing and travel budgets, and an edict that the glossy auction catalogues, which in the boom cost each of them £25m a year to produce, were no longer to be handed out like chocolate drops.
20.it was only a matter of time before both auctioneers started to muscle in on areas that had previously been the preserve of private dealers, matching buyers and sellers and selling new art rather than items that had already been in the market
21.In 2007 Christie’s chalked up private sales of $542m and Sotheby’s of $730m

COMMENT:
With the advent of the economic crisis, varies of business is receiving a hard beat. Unfortunately and fortunately, we see everywhere is undertaking a reorganization, of whose result perfectly explained "the survival of the fittest"

According to the author, the decline of the art market is distributed to the recession, and the only way to solve it inclined to the globalization, for the following reasons:
1. some part of the world is getting richer,and there are many potential buyers
2.the increasing number of the museum may bring an extra demand
3.diversity of the buyer helps to change the taste

As the perfect illustrations and the biggest auction companies,Sotheby's and  Christie’s are sharing the common strategy, they establish the worldwide auction house, at the same time, making their information almost transparency. At last,they put a lot of effort into advising buyers on how to improve their collections.