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.