'The world's largest art dealers'

December 20 2016

Video: Park West Gallery

If Donald Trump was an art dealer, he'd work for the Park West Gallery. A significant part of their business comes from cruise ships, where 'auctions' (like this one, with a lot of seemingly random gavel banging) convince unsuspecting holiday makers to pay strong prices for prints and reproductions. A key sales trick is to talk about 'estimated retail value' as a means of persuading people they're getting a bargain. But whose estimate? And often successful bidders don't get the actual work they've seen on the ship, but another replica shipped out from their storage facility in Florida.

On Bloomberg, Vernon Silver has written about Park West's cruise ship auctions, and why it's not a good idea to buy at them.

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