3.99 vase sells for $100,000

[Exhibitman]

Originally Posted by packs

If I remember correctly the original sellers of the African mask sought out an opinion from the person who ultimately bought it from them.

Not quite. An article by Adam Schrader on Art Net News on October 3, 2023, summarizes the issue perfectly, so I will just quote it (I am going to omit the paragraph breaks and leave out some of the extraneous details):

“A legal case making its way through the French court system is raising questions about whether a person who has sold an artwork or artifact later determined to have a much higher value can seek further compensation. An unnamed 81-year-old woman and her 88-year-old husband came across an African mask while clearing out their second home. While most of the contents of the home went into a garage sale, they decided to sell the mask to a local antiques dealer, who agreed to buy the mask for €150, or about $157, in September 2021. Months later, they discovered through reading the newspaper that their mask had just made €4.2 million ($4.4 million) at a specialized auction in Montpellier. ... The couple launched suit against the antiques dealer, who they believe cheated them. ... The couple’s argument hinges on the suspicion that the dealer had a good idea of the true value of the object when he bought it from them. The antiques dealer did not display the mask at his shop and instead contacted the auction houses Drouot Estimation and Fauve Paris, which estimated it to be worth about €100–€120, and €400–€600 respectively. Despite these valuations given by two auctioneers, he went on to seek a third opinion from a specialized sale of African objects in Montpellier. After ordering analysis using carbon-14 dating and mass spectrometry, the mask was dated to the 19th century and an ethnologist’s expert appraisal revealed it was used for purification rites by the Ngil society, a secret society that operated within the Fang ethnic group in Gabon until the 1920s. The auction house placed the mask for sale with an estimate of between €300,000 and €400,000. The mask was sold for €4.2 million, about $4.4 million, at an auction in March 2022.”

He sounds like a smart professional who took a risk, and it paid off. Hell, the experts he consulted had views that put the value of the mask in line with what he paid for it, and it was only after a lot more homework and testing that he got a crazy good outcome.

More to the point, philosophically speaking, even assuming that the dealer knew he was looking at a very valuable object, I do not think he had a duty to tell the sellers anything. Anyone with expertise has probably worked his butt off to get to that level of knowledge and has a right, in our hyper-capitalist society, to use it to profit. Nor do I think people with equal bargaining power (not knowledge, bargaining power) have anything to bitch about when the counterparty has superior knowledge and uses it to advantage. An expert has no reason to give up that advantage in an arms' length transaction. I heard about a similar situation over the weekend, $25 item morphing into a $50K item when a smart buyer figured it out. I am jealous but not critical. My only complaint is that I wasn't the one who found the golden ticket.

The vase deal is the mirror of that situation: the professional was blind without a cane and the buyer was canny. More power to her.