As a belated Christmas gift, George H. Singer, Esq., of the Minneapolis law firm Lindqvist & Vennum, legal counsel to John R. Stoebner, the court-appointed Chapter 7 Trustee in the PBE Corporation bankruptcy proceeding, sent me a “Notice and Demand” letter dated December 30, 2009, indicating his unhappiness, and his client’s, with some of the reportage and commentary posted here. I responded, and he replied, and I replied in turn, in a full and frank exchange of views. You’ll find our collected correspondence here. […]
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The proposed sell-off of the historic Polaroid Collection has moved a step closer to reality with the announcement by Sotheby’s of dates for the auction: June 21-22, 2010. If the sale does go through as planned and on schedule, it will take place well after the spring art-market season has come and gone and the art and photo worlds have closed up shop for the summer — not to mention in the midst of a deep global recession that has hit the art market hard and the photo market especially hard, with no immediate improvement on the event horizon. […] Given that a single Steichen print went for close to $3 million just a few years back, and a single Gursky sold for over $3 million shortly thereafter, the notion that no one in what Maneker calls “the photography market” can afford to buy the Polaroid Collection is laughable on its face. If price is no object, then what is? This brings me to the logical conclusion that every potential buyer has discovered in examining the collection’s documentation that the bulk of it is contractually encumbered in ways that prohibit (or at least problematize) its sale, thus also making perilous its purchase as a whole. . . . […] |
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Polaroid Collection: Update 16
Even assuming the auction by Sotheby’s goes through as planned, it includes only 1260 works out of an inventoried total of 15,936. That leaves 14,676 still in the hands of the court-appointed trustee, John R. Stoebner, for disposition. So we need to turn some of our attention to alerting suitable repositories to the desirability and ongoing availability of the bulk of the collection, which remains a unique anthology of twentieth-century visual culture. In short, we need to help the trustee find this collection — complete as is, or minus the auction selection but otherwise intact — a good new home. […]