Alexandra Wolfe profiles Marianne Boesky in The Wall Street Journal and it ends with a remarkable statement. In its truncated form, the quote is hard to fully parse. The key word would seem to be “enlist:”
[G]roups of speculators can buy a large amount of work by a particular artist, put the pieces up for sale at auction and then enlist their friends to bid up the prices. If the works sell well, the speculators can reap tidy profits. “You can call that collusion, but it’s not illegal, and I don’t even know if it’s unethical,” she says. She admits there is a fine line. “You could compare it to insider trading in that…all the little people who don’t get access get hurt by losing opportunity,” she says, “but it’s all very gray.”
