Wednesday, November 13, 2013

I Love a Garage Sale

I love a good auction … and by auction, I mean, garage sale … because, let’s be real, an auction is really nothing more than a rich man’s garage sale. Someone has some junk they don’t want anymore because they’re moving, or they’ve been evicted, or … something … so they decide to sell it all. And the only real difference between an auction and a garage sale is that most times the auction house doesn’t staple ‘For Sale’ signs to telephone poles in the neighborhood. And, okay, sometimes auctions have better hand-me-downs.

Like at Christie’s auction house this week where a 1969 Francis Bacon triptych — “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” — sold for a whopping $142.4 million.

And here I thought the ceramic cat salt and pepper shakers I got at a yard sale in Smallville for 25-cents was a good buy.

The price for the triptych, which depicts Bacon’s friend Lucian Freud perched on a wooden chair, was almost double the $85 million Christie’s had estimated. It also toppled the previous record set in May 2012 when Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” sold at Sotheby’s for $119.9 million.

One man’s trash is another man’s $142 million check, I guess, though I'm betting you can get the same thing at Home Goods for about $49.99.

Unless someone has one in their attic they wanna sell.

6 comments:

  1. That's outrageous! Where are the caps on this stuff. And why pay that much for those????????

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  2. Lucien Freud's work is dross

    https://secure.greenpeace.org.uk/page/-/images/email-images/Arctic%2030%20arrive%20in%20St%20Petersberg.jpg follow this link to see the Russian police escort the Greenpeace 30 to their new prison and laugh at the reverse logos on the jackets in homophobe Russia

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  3. Technically speaking, and auction and a yard sale are different. At an auction you have multiple people bidding on items. At a yard sale a person picks up an item and pays the owner, with no competition from others.

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  4. @Mark
    Um, I was kidding? =)

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  5. I saw this story on the telly last night and thought... how obscene for someone to have that much cash to spend on three pieces of crap! They could have given half of that amount to aid in the phillipines and still have lead a comfortable lifestyle... even without the crapart on the wall

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  6. My Fine Arts professor used to announce that *some* art is "Art with a Capital A!!!" I expect this is what he was talking about.

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