Ren Renfa News Today

1.The Mongols inhabited a vast, featureless grass plain where the soil was too thin for crops. They raised horses, cattle, yaks, sheep, and goats, and subsisted almost entirely on meat and milk and milk products. The women milked the cows and the men milked the mares. They had no fixed houses and lived in yurts made of greased felt that they hauled on ox-drawn carts. Inside

© Sotheby’s It’s been a tough year for auction houses. The “big three” – Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips – suffered a combined 79% drop in revenue for the second quarter of 2020 compared with the same three months in 2019, according to art market analytics firm Pi-eX. Spring is usually a busy period on the art-market calendar, but the dearth was hardly surprising given the pandemic. The first wave saw art fairs and galleries around the world close, while hammers fell silent ...

MONEYWEB app instead? What a $32m dinosaur can tell us about this year’s art auctions Although the top of the auction market is never a great indicator of how the art market is doing. By James Tarmy, Bloomberg 20 Dec 2020  00:38  A Tyrannosaurus Rex dinosaur fossil know as Stan is displayed in a gallery at Christies auction house in New York on September 17, 2020. Image: Spencer Platt/Getty Images During a lovely spring week in May 2019, in what now feels like the halcyon days of pr...

There is almost no way that major auction houses would not see a significant drop in auction sales in 2020 given that traditional live auctions were suspended for a full nine months (not to mention the fact that the entire world was experiencing unprecedented upheaval). Considering this backdrop, then, Sotheby’s and Christie’s final results for 2020 depict a fairly resilient sector—although perhaps not quite as resilient as they might like to project. Since both houses are now private c...

Specialists bidding in New York during Sothebys Contemporary evening sale in June © Julian Cassady Photography LTD Sotheby’s year end revenue has edged ahead of Christies, reporting total global sales of over $5bn compared to Christies $4.4bn (£3.4bn). But as both auction houses are now private companies, their profit margins are not known. Somewhat remarkably for a year ruptured by a global pandemic, Sothebys total sales are up from $4.8bn in 2019, (though likely still ...

Auctioneer Oliver Barker holding court over Sothebys global e-auctions. Courtesy of Sothebys. The art trade is defined by far more than its uppermost echelon. But in an unprecedented year when virtually ever major auction went… well, virtual, top prices serve as a valuable benchmark—and an indication that the world’s wealthiest did not view 2020 as a roadblock to spending big money on art. If we’re judging by auction prices alone, though, the market was still considerably less frothy at...