Major prices: For Minor art, as Nurse sells for $6.5 million
This one painting by Richard Prince brought $6.5 million, as well as compliments about Minor's eye for art.PHILLIPS DE PURY
The contemporary collection of embattled art collector/hotel maker Halsey Minor touched off a Thursday night bidding war and brought in nearly enough to satisfy the claim against him by Merrill Lynch, the financial firm that won a $21.6 million judgment against him last year.
The pre-sale estimate for the May 13 event was $16.3-23.9 million with another $3.0-5.9 million left to sell in two additional auctions. The first of these, May 14, brought an additional $3 million; the latter is slated for June 9.
But because Minor is under a court order to pay the Sotheby's auction house $6.64 million, he may be hoping the latter sales exceed estimates. Meanwhile, in the state of California, where Minor is the top tax delinquent, a trial is underway on issues between him and the Christie's auction house. Minor, whose business successes are legion (he co-founded Cnet, funded salesforce.com and the predecessor to GoogleVoice and more recently scored with Scout Labs and OpenDNS), traces his liquidity issues to Merrill, a company now part of Bank of America but which he he vows to eventually own.
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–story updated Tuesday, May 18 to include results of May 14 auction also.
Bloomberg and the New York Times have reports on the May 13 auction.
6 comments
I hope he does eventually own Bank of America, and I hope he manages it with more decency and honesty than have his predecessors. Bank of America has a history of game playing with credit cards. (Alteration of due dates without proper notification in an apparent bid to farm cash from the abundance of late fees this practice generates.) It is also impossible now to go to a branch with a question about a credit card issue. They divorced the branches from the card center, no doubt to diminish the number of irate customers in their lobbies. They also have computer settings which generate the maximum number of bounce fees, and then will not correct their own errors.
I have dumped my checking accounts with them, my BOA stocks, and credit card with them. Their purchase of ML has not thrilled me, but when the time is right, as long as their parent company is BOA, I'll dump them too.
Minor may contend with jealous masses, but no one who's had day to day contact sees him sees him as evil or vile.
Richard Prince is one of the greatest American living artists. Halsey -- the least one can say -- had great taste in art, or great advice about what art to purchase.
Daddy Warbucks is finished? All he had to do was be a "good" guy and not think he knew everything. Now he has lost it all. Wish he would just let the hotel go and he could do Charlottesville a big favor and save himself more humiliation (if he knows the meaning of the word). The theory that everyone else is wrong and he is the only virtuous man in the universe is not holding up.
re:"I’m no fan f BofA but at least their bank on the mall is lovely and finished."
ZING.
people
please read between the lines
on what the times has to say
and prince
he is no prince.
thank you
js
The market cap of Bank America is nearly 170 billion dollars. For Halsey to own just 1% he would have to all his money in Bank America stock. That would be 1.7 billion dollars, not likely.
Another empty boast by someone who has become the poster boy for the internet excess of the 90's. I'm no fan f BofA but at least their bank on the mall is lovely and finished.