David Lay Chinese porcelain beats auction estimate 40 times over
Worth £25,000
The value of a Chinese porcelain at David Lay's recent auction in Cornwall, UK took everyone by surprise, especially its consignor.
"She was having a home hairdo at the time," Mr Lay explained to the BBC.
"I had to hang on until I could talk to her, but of course she was very pleased."
The 18th century porcelain in question was a damaged and incomplete altarpiece in the form of a Tibetan stupa structure, which had appeared at the December auction with a high-end estimate of £600.
The item sold for £25,000 to a London-based dealer, with a bevy of bidders from China pushing the price far beyond expectations.
"To my right was a computer screen and I could see these Chinese bidders fighting away and the price soaring," said Lay.
"Nine times out of 10 we come pretty close with our price estimates, but I am delighted to confess that we got this one spectacularly wrong."
Its previous owner had employed the 22cm-high piece as a table lamp.
The sale is a reminder of the strong value of Chinese artefacts at the moment.
The growing prosperity of China is a key factor in the buoyancy of the market.
There are more than 960,000 millionaires in the country, with numbers up 9.7% in 2010 compared with the previous year, according to data from the Hurun Research Institute.
It is no wonder that among the growing numbers of millionaires exist aspirational collectors keen to repatriate their country's rich artistic heritage.
Source : Paul Fraser Collectables
Out of tune: Concert violinists can’t identify the sound of a multi-million-pound Stradivarius
The Stradivarius is thought to be one of the most beautiful musical instruments ever made.
Top violinists have paid millions of pounds to get their hands on the 300-year-old fiddle.
But it has now emerged that musicians cannot tell the difference between that and a modern violin.
Claudia Fritz, a researcher at the University of Paris, tested 21 virtuoso performers at an international competition in Indiannapolis.
She found they did not prefer the old violins when playing three modern ones and three made by Italian maestros in darkness, The Guardian reported.
One of the antique instruments was made by Guarneri del Gesu around 1740, and two in Antonio Stradivari's workshop around 1700.
Ms Fritz dimmed the lights and passed the violins in random order to the musicians, who had to wear welders' goggles and stand behind a dividing curtain.
Each had to rank the instruments according to their playability, projection, response and quality of sound.
The violinists mostly preferred new instruments, and overall they were least keen on one of the two Stradivaris. They also could not tell whether their favourite violin was old or new.
'The old versus new issue doesn't make any sense,' said Ms Fritz. 'They are beautiful instruments, but the prices are insane.
'It doesn't matter if the violin's old or new, all that matters is whether it's a good violin or a bad violin.'
The researchers could find no link between the age and value of the violins and how they were rated by the violinists.
The three old instruments had a combined value of $10million - a hundred times that of the modern violins.
Ms Fritz describes her findings as a 'striking challenge to conventional wisdom' in her report published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
She said it showed that modern violin makers were doing a great job.
The players were not completely blinded because that would interfere with their perception too much. With goggles on, they could only see an instrument's outline.
To mask any telltale aroma from the old instruments, the chin rest on each was dabbed with perfume.
One shortcoming of the study was that the violinists were asked to rate a particular instrument's projection - how well its sound travels - themselves, said the newspaper. Another was that only a few violins were tested.
But the researchers said that the latter was unavoidable, because owners of fragile, valuable old violins were reluctant to hand them over to scientists and 'blindfolded strangers'.
Kai-Thomas Roth, secretary of the British Violin Making Association, said double blind tests, where neither experimenter nor musician knows which violin is played, had already shown people cannot distinguish a modern violin from an expensive masterpiece.
He said older instruments were helped by some myth-making, as musicians would work harder with a Stradivari, rather than just blaming their tools for any difficulties.
Antonio Stradivari, 1644 to 1737, is credited with devising the proportions of the modern violin, thus giving it a more powerful and rounded sound. About 650 of his violins, violas, and violoncellos are still in existence.
Source : Daily Mail