Posted By:
Tim NewcombI'm an agnostic about whether anything dubious went on here-- I tend to think, like Barry, that it was some sort of honest screwup.
However, I can't get my head around the distinction between an auction being hammered and the auctioneer saying "sold". Does that mean that if he doesn't utter the particular word "sold," any lot can be withheld from any buyer for any reason? If so the whole auction concept is meaningless. Surely the hammering implies a sale to any reasonable person, whatever word is used to indicate the closing of the lot.
I also think that Matt has a perfect right to ask these questions, and that if the people ridiculing him found themselves on the other side of a situation like this, they wouldn't want to be crapped on for bringing it up. If you don't want to respond, then leave it alone. All that said, if it were me I'd probably just wait for Dave Hunt to explain, and move on.
For the record, I was there, I remember the lot, and I checked this morning with the friend who was sitting next to me. We both wrote down $1200 as the hammer price. There seemed nothing unusual about the hammer.
The way it works at Hunt is: the lot is announced, Dave Hunt announces the highest absentee bid, and the auctioneer then takes bids from the floor and Hunt's reps on phones. It goes fast but the auctioneer looks around pretty carefully everywhere, and takes a few extra seconds, to make sure there are no more bidders, before hammering the lot. He announces the amount, and -- always -- the number of the high bidder, whether on the floor, phone, or net. To the best of my recollection, that's exactly what happened with this lot. I wasn't writing down bidder numbers.