GeorgeH

The reference library was getting buggy before they closed it. Now the links don't work. https://www.bromptons.co Plus, pictures of individual lots from the Skinner auctions are slowly disappearing from the Bonhams Skinner website.

Agreed, that is not in the same quality universe as Banks' instruments.

Welcome to MN! It looks like a French violin c. 1900 that could have been imported and sold by any number of shops. You said it doesn’t have a label but I can see one inside the bass f-hole. What does it say?

It looks Gagliano-inspired to me and not a "spiced up German."

Ha ha-I couldn’t imagine how “Germany “ and “Paris” could be in the same brand, but you figured it out.

It has been rumored the Otto Hoyer made some of the bows stamped with “Leon Pique”.

To be clear, I don’t think it is at all failsafe. The cognitive biases of buyers and sellers ensure that. And “professionals” are not excluded, as can also be seen in securities trading. There is no escaping the foibles of our own brains.

I think that Sotheby’s and Christie’s are quite familiar with the behavior of professional bidders. All of us human beings suffer from (or benefit from) our cognitive biases, even if we don’t want to believe that we do.

As you know, in a fair auction where all bidders have the same information, the winner generally pays too much. In cognitive bias terms, this is called the “winner’s curse.” There is also a cognitive bias called “anchoring” where the first party in a negotiation to mention a number tends to anchor the negotiation toward achieving that number. Auction estimates serve as a strong anchor towards a final price. From this observer’s point of view, it was interesting that the bidders overcame the anchoring bias of the estimate. As the final price was so much lower than the low estimate, the buyer may feel they got a great deal, but they still may be a victim of the winner’s curse. Only time will tell. Funny that Tarisio subtly (or maybe not so subtly) kind of rubbed it in Sotheby’s face that the price was so low relative to Sotheby’s estimate. That’s the second time in a year or so that a major art auction house has had a poor result selling a Strad relative to their estimates.

Apparently not if you were the buyer.

I think it appears to have been a fair auction where it sold to the highest bidder. What more is there to say?

Only 70% sold is not very good and exceeding estimates does not mean record-setting prices. The fine art market has cooled down quite a bit. That is what the big sellers are saying.

Prices in the world of fine arts aren’t setting records like they were a few years ago.

Is the stick wood flush with the metal underneath? I wonder if it was a commercial prefabricated repair kit that was used for repairing a broken stick and/or frog. I can't imagine why anybody would buy a new bow with that monstrosity on it. I can understand why it would be used as a repair device as it would make it simple to replace a frog by tacking on that slide with a pre-fitted frog.