You can blameGeorgeand Martha Washington for my love affair with online art auctions — or actually, two bedraggled dolls made in the image of the original first couple. They were a little more than a foot tall, made of carved wood and wire and painted by an unknown hand ages ago. “George’s hair has thinned, Martha is missing her right thumb,” read the sales description. They seduced me despite their dingy colonial attire and faces that had the waxed shine of supermarket fruit. To me, they were folk relics that embodied American culture: neither trash or treasure but a bit of both. They sold for 90 bucks.
It was April 2021, and I’d spent the second pandemic spring mostly indoors, tumbling down internet wormholes, one of which led to the motley world of online art auctions. If the Salvation Army had a pop-up exhibition inside the Museum of Modern Art, it might look something like these auctions: eclectic and drunkenly curated, with a sensibility that toggles un-self-consciously between highbrow and low. All my pet infatuations — visual art, trash culture, ephemera, kitsch, history — were there to ogle, well lit and attractively photographed.
In their haphazardness, online auctions remind me of the drab estate sales in the Ohio boondocks of my youth, where a recently deceased person’s life — incomplete sets of Time Life books, mismatched dinnerware, Franklin Mint plates commemorating John Wayne or Princess Diana — are parceled into cardboard boxes for gawkers to pick through on a Saturday morning. But instead of imagining the contours of someone else’s life, online auctions make me ask: Am I a person who needs to own a 19th-century Chinese snuff bottle? Or a painting of a monkey feeding a cat with a spoon?
Some of these auctions have precise themes: “The Tie in Photography,” or work from the collection of Uesugi Mochinori, a Japanese noble of the late Edo period. Others are catchall, consisting of so many different kinds of items — photographs of midcentury car wrecks, a sketch attributed to Gustav Klimt — that the sale is a kind of wunderkammer. In these cases, auction catalogs are lavish way finders, most often downloadable PDFs or online galleries noting a work’s provenance, dimensions and condition, and occasionally include a descriptive back story; sometimes they are stylishly printed and bound volumes. The catalogs are desirable enough that old copies themselves are often auctioned.
One of my favorites is the catalog that accompanies Swann’s annual LGBTQ+ Art, Material Culture & History sale, which includes more than 200 items of queer marginalia from the Civil War era to today. Here, for instance, is some trivia about Mike Miksche (a.k.a. Steve Masters), a former Air Force flight captain who produced jaunty erotic art in the 1950s and ’60s: “He was commissioned by the Kinsey Institute to appear in films demonstrating sadomasochistic sex acts, mainly with the tattoo artist and writer Samuel M. Steward.” Another lot featured greeting cards from Third World Gay Revolution, a cadre of radical queer activists from the 1970s.
Navigating this bounty requires that I draw an aesthetic line in the sand: Here’s what I like, and I’m willing to pay for it. Recently, I came close to bidding on Gregory Gorby’s 1992 piece “Club Miraflores,” a nearly life-size sculpture of a dancer brandishing her breasts to a circle of leering men below. My rational mind knows the sculpture is tacky and borderline offensive, yet my reptilian brain loves its louche effervescence. In these auctions there’s no accounting for taste — only paying a price for it.
The offbeat, rangy conception of art I found in these auctions has changed how I think about my own aesthetic judgment. Before I encountered the auctions, I understood it to be sardonic and raw (I love, for example, the work of Jean Dubuffet). From the privacy of my couch, I can indulge art that I wouldn’t necessarily recommend in public. I’m thinking of a 2005 painting titled “Peter (Home Sweet Home)” that shows a man in a baggy T-shirt and cutoff shorts, hunched in front of a chalkboard scrawled with mathematical formulas, his hand down his pants. It’s a quirky portrait that has the boorishness of novelty art. Yet the longer I look at it, the more nuanced it becomes. The contrast between the academic seriousness of the backdrop and the rudeness of the gesture is intriguing. Plus, there’s the cheekiness of the composition: Peter’s crotch is the visual and thematic centerpiece, a fact emphasized by the pixelated arrow on his shirt pointing south. I wasn’t the only one charmed by its riddles; the painting sold for $625.
Again and again, auctions offer opportunities to look more closely and think more generously. The inevitable question when browsing some of this stuff is: Why would anyone want it? I want it, in part, because it’s so unlovely or neglected. Now the work of someone like Marvin Francis, whose expressive sculptures of prison inmates are made out of toilet paper, looks to me as elegant as Rodin’s. The auctions are a back channel to work that’s not on view, to artists who are rarely exhibited and to forms — velvet paintings, snapshots, advertising — usually destined for the landfill. True, I’m often puzzled by what I find, but I’m also inspired by these treasure troves, in which every object might be a masterpiece waiting for its wall.
Jeremy Lybarger is a writer and the features editor at the Poetry Foundation.
