Accord­ing to Bloomberg.com
the auc­tion has been halted and Fred Leighton owner, Ralph Esmer­ian, will be per­mit­ted to sell this col­lec­tion of highly unique jew­els pri­vately. The gem dealer/jeweler asserts that the results of a pri­vate sale will yield more than Christie’s esti­mated auc­tion prices.

One ancil­lary yet debat­able ques­tion that arises out of this sit­u­a­tion is how the value of rare, antique pieces is deter­mined. Empress Eugénie’s brooch has unpar­al­leled his­tor­i­cal inter­est. How does an appraiser place a pre­cise dol­lar amount on some­thing so sin­gu­lar in terms of crafts­man­ship and of such cul­tural importance?

One of my col­leagues remarked that all jew­elry, if cost isn’t an object, can be repli­cated. The state­ment is accu­rate log­i­cally, and per­haps, artis­ti­cally; how­ever there remains the ques­tion of the intan­gi­ble, yet dis­cernible, value of prove­nance and/or sig­na­ture (respec­tively, who owned it and/or cre­ated it). A hand made object bears the marks of its maker. How can the assess­ment of an art object not con­sider the moment in time at which it was made and the degree of skill of the arti­san, dur­ing the period he cre­ated it? The swoosh of cars pass­ing by or the chat­ter of cell­phone con­ver­sa­tions did not exist on the streets of nineteenth-century Paris, when met­al­smiths and gem­set­ters went to work on Empress Eugénie’s dia­mond bow. Time (and accom­plish­ment) was then mea­sured day by day, not in mil­lisec­onds as it is now. Hand crafts­man­ship of jew­elry is prac­ti­cally extinct today; the finest vin­tage exam­ples should hold a well-informed and respected place in the field of val­u­a­tion. Sadly, they do not.

Much of Alexan­der Calder’s jew­elry was made from brass, a base metal. The value of these pieces is in the evi­dence of the artist’s hand–not the mate­r­ial with which it was made. One appraiser friend sug­gested that the only way val­u­a­tion can be deter­mined for these unusual exam­ples is by find­ing a com­pa­ra­ble jewel and auc­tion sale of it; this infor­ma­tion may then be used as a yard­stick for mea­sure­ment. This kind of think­ing does not take into con­sid­er­a­tion the indi­vid­ual nature of an arti­fact or work of art. Still, this way of assess­ment is com­mon­place and the accepted stan­dard by which mar­ket value is deter­mined. An imper­fect yet ratio­nal method­ol­ogy, it lacks in true appre­ci­a­tion what it accom­plishes in tal­lied reasoning.