Sotheby's bad karma bites it in the butt

The Whitney's frou-frou exhibit disrupted by supporters of locked-out Sotheby's Teamsters.

Sotheby's lockout of 42 Teamster art handlers during a period of record profit seems to have brought the wrath of the gods on the auction house.

One Sotheby's director just quit as chairman of an international corporation because of his alleged crimes. Another director gets caught on youtube talking down to art handlers in a performance worthy of Cruella DeVille. Other directors' businesses have been disrupted. When protesters loudly denounced Sotheby director Danny Meyer during his restaurant's busy dinner hour, it went viral on the Internet.

Now the Museum of Modern Art is involved in a legal tangle because it won't cut its ties with Sotheby's. Occupy Museums is demanding payment for a banner MoMA confiscated inside the museum during an action in solidarity with the Teamsters. Just this week, the Whitney Museum was targeted for its ties to Sotheby's in several embarrassing and well-publicized actions. Read about them here and here and here.

On top of all that, the New York Times last week ran a front-page story about the Cambodian relic Sotheby's wants to sell though it was apparently looted from the Killing Fields. (Even Chumlee on Pawn Stars knows better than to fence stolen art.)

Karma's a bitch, ain't it? During this time of growing social unrest, Sotheby's bad behavior has come to epitomize the cruelty, arrogance and possible criminality of the 1 percent.

But there's more to it than karma. We learned recently that Sotheby's profit was lower than forecast, not by a little but by a lot. This is a big deal in the world of finance. We suspect that the added costs for security guards and union-busting lawyers had a teensy bit to do with Sotheby's lower profit.

This suggests to us that Sotheby's represents more than bad behavior. It represents the unsustainable economic systems we live with today, systems that are so top-heavy they're falling in on themselves.

A hoax press release put out by Sotheby's Teamsters supporters last week described the imbalance:

...the financial speculation on art taking place in secondary sales of works benefits wealthy investors far more than the artists who created the works, let alone the workers who craft, move, install, maintain, or guard them...

If artists and art workers cannot live on what they earn, there will be no more art. In the end, Sotheby's will have destroyed itself.