Word: auction
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...John Skow's story "In Missouri: A Beastly Display" [Jan. 19]-was beastly in more ways than one. His description of the animal auction was grimly reminiscent of slave sales in the antebellum South, conducted for much the same reason: "pleasure" and profit. Today more and more concerned people hope that the slavery of animals eventually will be viewed with the same disgust, and condemned with the same moral righteousness, as human chattel...
...group decided to bid for Navajo rather suddenly. Rita Schwinghamer saw a newspaper story announcing that the town would be sold at auction the following day by its owners, a family of local ranchers. "We thought it would be a good idea to buy," says Rita. They did not have time to visit Navajo, a 250-mile drive from Phoenix, but did look it up on a map. Their bid of $615,000 was the best submitted by eleven prospective buyers, including a Baltimore nightclub owner who wanted to turn the town into a haven for retired strippers...
...sale day at the Phoenix Art Museum, members of the Men's Arts Council are stationed by the paintings with cake boxes at the ready. This is not an auction but a sale at prices fixed by each artist. The 1,500 collectors crowded into the gallery (fire laws won't permit more) pay $75 each for the privilege of stuffing intent-to-purchase chips into the cake boxes. Then names of lucky purchasers are drawn out of the boxes, sometimes from among several hundred chips. The expensive works tend to attract the most chips. Tonight John Clymer...
...surplus property division of Iowa's department of general services for the benefit of some 1,500 public agencies in Iowa. A beneficent act of Congress requires that federal excess property be offered to state and local agencies, virtually free of charge, before it is put on public auction. That means before all those cigar-chomping characters who excel at turning a profit from reselling Government castoffs can lay hands...
...woman who wrote "the definitive cinematic study of Gummo Marx." It means being offered unproducible scripts, including a musical-comedy treatment of the Guyana massacre. It means being solicited to join committees for Soviet dissidents, to help stamp out leukemia, to donate a personal item to a celebrity auction for the blind ("Somebody told me you wear a truss. An old truss would be just wonderful"). It means being asked to sit for an interview on "the shallow indifference of wealthy celebrities." And everywhere there are autograph freaks. A young woman asks, "Would you sign my left breast?" He does...