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Posted By: Corey R. Shanus

At this point I'm not sure anybody can say how high the bidding actually went. As I understand the law in New York State, an auction house may place ficticious bids up to the item's reserve. This actually is quite a common and accepted practice (though in my view repugnant because its sole purpose is to mislead perspective bidders into believing that there is an actual bidder at those ficticious bids) among the major auction houses (e.g., Sothebys, Christies). So with that said, unless we know for a fact that the last bid was not a ficticious house bid (which I'm not saying was but legally could have been), we wouldn't really know how high a real bidder would be willing to pay for the item. And even if that last bid was from a real bidder, in the event he/she was bid up to that point through ficticious house bids, the market around that final bid could conceivably be so thin as to be only one person.