Simon de Pury brought his auctioneer's hammer down on the frosted-glass rostrum at Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg's auction house on November 5 2002, to begin a sale of works by artists such as Monet, Picasso and Cezanne.
A dozen works by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele went fast.
Then de Pury, the auction house's chairman, initiated the bidding on a Monet painting he estimated was worth at least $6.5 million. Bidding ended at $5.6 million.
"Shall we try one more?" de Pury asked. "No more?" His hammer hit the block, and he mumbled his defeat: "Pass", signalling that the item had not reached the seller's minimum price and had failed to sell.
It was a turning point. Phillips, a third-place auctioneer run by two former executives of Sotheby's Holdings and backed by LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, had tried to gain market share from Christie's International and Sotheby's while the two giants were facing US justice department charges that they had violated antitrust laws by conspiring to fix commissions.
By the end of that November evening after the Monet failed to sell, only 19 of 44 works offered had been sold. The final tally was $7.01 million - well below the auctioneer's estimate of $49.3 million to $66.7 million.
Four years after the price-fixing charges, Christie's and Sotheby's still control at least 80 percent of the $5 billion international auction market, according to 2002 data provided by the world's top 10 auctioneers.
Their collusion, described by former Sotheby's chief executive Diana Brooks during the four-week trial of former Sotheby's chairman Alfred Taubman in 2001, took place from 1993 to 1999.
Phillips began its bid for art-world prominence at the end of 1999 and helped restore competition to the highest echelons of the auction marketplace.
It aimed to capture its rivals' customers using guarantees, whereby it offered sellers of art a fixed price for a piece of work even if it brought less at auction.
In the standard auction arrangement, the auctioneer sells a work on behalf of a client for the highest price the market will bear and charges both seller and buyer a fee.
Delving into LVMH's deep pockets, de Pury & Phillips president Daniella Luxembourg bought major Impressionist and modern art collections at guaranteed prices - often much higher than the prices they expected to fetch at auction.
They were prepared to lose money to raise the auctioneer's profile and win clients from their competitors, Luxembourg says.
The strategy failed. However, Phillips altered the industry by popularising guarantees among sellers, known as consignors.
"They made the use of guarantees as a business-getting practice more widespread," says David Nash, co-owner of the Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery in New York.
"The antitrust suit didn't change the behaviour of consignors or the art world," says Tobias Meyer, Sotheby's head of contemporary art. "Phillips did."
Neither Sotheby's nor Christie's would disclose the amount they spend on guarantees or how guarantees have affected their profits. Sotheby's sold $1.8 billion of art in 2002 and reported total revenue of $345.1 million. Its shares traded at $14.74 on the New York Stock Exchange last Friday, up from $6.49 last May.
Privately held Christie's, which also reported $1.8 billion in auction sales in 2002, doesn't disclose its revenue.
Guarantees also affect the way buyers view the auction houses. "It makes the public more uneasy, because not disinterested parties any more," says Frances Beatty, a Manhattan art dealer. "They absolutely have to sell the art."
As for Phillips, today it almost never offers guarantees. It raised $11 million at its contemporary art sale in November - without guarantees. "The most important thing to do now is to establish that we are stable and that we can make it," Luxembourg says. It's a far more modest ambition for the house of Phillips.