What a scumbag. Make sure to read to the end of the article to read about things that he undoubtedly stole. Good job by the New Yorker journalist getting to the bottom of things and not being charmed by this psychopath. Very good article overall.
It is very depressing to see large public and non profit institutions be snowed in by his showmanship and spending millions of their funds on this glorified celebrity worship. It is good for museums to have letters of famous writers and their notes and such but it is an absolute waste for them to pay millions when they can pay hundreds of thousands. For most of these archives it seems that most and all bidders would be public or non profit institutions. Why would they outbid each other to waste more public or non profit money? In many cases it seems like there was no competitive bidding at all, horowitz merely came in with a crazy high price and they agreed to it. If they had a bit of a back bone they could have done the deals for much less.
But it was quite hilarious to read how he convinced other thieves to buy his overpriced collections. I can imagine his sales pitch “you will be so respected if you become an antique books and manuscripts collector! You will be the cream of society. They will forget about your business dealings.”
> Why would they outbid each other to waste more public or non profit money?
Because like it or not, even public and non-profit institutions are in competition with one another. Maybe not for money specifically, but prestige, notoriety and having access to single “one-of-a-kind” items. All of those bring more attention, publicity and funding.
If you want to see or review the original drafts of an author, you can only do that at the single location that has those papers and documentation. Every one of these things is worth exactly as much as they will bring in in additional funding and notoriety. If these institutions are being snowed it is because of their own hubris and overestimation of the value of the artifacts in question.
But my (limited) understanding is this sort of arbitrary pricing, valuations and “just this side of legal/ethical if you don’t ask too many questions” is par for the course in any museum/artifact business. History once it passes out of memory is all about stories. And the value of any given item is how good of a story it can be made to tell, and how that story will bring in audiences. The skeleton of a crocodile might be interesting, but not worth much. The skeleton of a crocodile that was estimated to have been alive at the end of the age of dinosaurs is a story to sell, even if to someone viewing the bones there’s no difference.
He was a market maker where there was very little liquidity. Given that, all valuations in this world are subjective at best. He just made more liquidity than most, so the process of spitballing valuations became more focused on one individual doing it. Him. He just sprinkled in a little sociopathy to make it more beneficial to him.
It is very depressing to see large public and non profit institutions be snowed in by his showmanship and spending millions of their funds on this glorified celebrity worship. It is good for museums to have letters of famous writers and their notes and such but it is an absolute waste for them to pay millions when they can pay hundreds of thousands. For most of these archives it seems that most and all bidders would be public or non profit institutions. Why would they outbid each other to waste more public or non profit money? In many cases it seems like there was no competitive bidding at all, horowitz merely came in with a crazy high price and they agreed to it. If they had a bit of a back bone they could have done the deals for much less.
But it was quite hilarious to read how he convinced other thieves to buy his overpriced collections. I can imagine his sales pitch “you will be so respected if you become an antique books and manuscripts collector! You will be the cream of society. They will forget about your business dealings.”