News

UK: THE last of the monthly sales of collectors’ items and antiques of the year at Cirencester was dominated in visual terms by a pair of Cotswold stone columns, 7ft 6in (2.25m) high, which had been rescued by the vendor from a cowshed where they had lain for 60 years. They achieved a new-found status when they sold at £1200.

UK: LOCAL bidders accounted for most of the Oriental and European ceramics and works of art offered at Edinburgh where 306 lots totalled £75,000 but the top seller went to an English bidder.

HOPES of clarifying ownership rights over items sold at auction on the Internet have suffered a setback with the settling out of court of a potentially precedent-setting case.

Sotheby’s Holdings have confirmed that eight per cent of their staff worldwide – around 165 employees – are to lose their jobs as part of a cost-cutting and restructuring programme.

UK: BONHAMS and Brooks are to close their Manchester saleroom, compress departments in London and make 15 staff redundant in the first major shake-up since the two companies merged in September.

UK: THE Export Review Committee, which assesses whether outstanding works of art should be allowed to leave the country, has helped six such pieces stay in Britain in the past year.

UK: IF you stood fuming on the cocktail party sidelines over the festive season as your wife/husband got on famously with a lecherous member of the opposite sex, then something like this oversized (18in) metal syringe and vial which appeared at Christie's South Kensington on December 12, would have come in rather useful.