The breathless desire of the mighty auction

I want a new rule for auctions. Our local primary school is holding an auction this weekend. On offer will be a hundred or so works of art, or art-adjacent material, produced by local people. Proceeds go to the school. The event happens every two years and is unfailingly popular. Last time it raised some $70,000. Some of the money comes from selling pics, the rest from selling tickets. Many of the people who attend buy nothing. They come along because it’s a good night out, or because it’s a good cause, or because it’s a community thing. Or simply because they like an auction. And why not? Auctions have it all.

Everyone loves a story, and a story consists of three things — a beginning, a middle, and an end. So does an auction. The beginning is the presentation of the item to be auctioned. It is held up for viewing. Its merits are outlined. This is the opening paragraph, the setting of the scene. The auctioneer then invites us to plunge into the middle, the action, the bidding. Plot lines arise, a strong loud bidder at the front of the room, say, and a shower of competing bids from all over. But as the price rises the minor bidders fall away and the outcome seems assured. Then in prances the dark horse at the back, in felted shoes. The two rivals go at it. The auctioneer drives them onwards and upwards in a narrowing spiral of conflict towards an inevitable ending, gavel poised. Then bang, the gavel falls, the story is told, the ending known. And already the auctioneer is laying out the opening paragraph of the next little story. It’s addictive entertainment.

And at the heart of every auction is money, which is the world’s most interesting stuff. So potent is money, so achingly desirable, that we are shy to speak of it. We speak of dough, dosh, beans, moolah, stash, readies, anything rather than name the thing itself. Ask someone precisely what they earn and see them squirm. Such things are not done in polite society. But they are in auctions. In auctions the money’s on direct show. ‘At thirty thousand dollars, going once at thirty thousand dollars ...’. It is thrilling, like nudity. And note how at the end of a particularly strong auction the room will burst into applause at the sum of money frankly offered and accepted.

Am I alone in also seeing something sexual in auctions? Every auction begins with desire. The bidder lusts after what is on offer, wants to become one with it, to possess it, to run his or her proprietorial hand over its surfaces. The bidding rises and the temperature with it, the pulse racing, climbing the breathless stair to the almost unbearable point of crisis. Nothing else matters. Then comes the orgasmic gavel-bang and the union is consummated, the deed done. Whereupon, with astonishing rapidity, everything detumesces, and the buyer wonders what all the fuss was about, and whether he might have got carried away and paid too much. Auctions are also akin to sport. Both are conflict without bloodshed and we are hard-wired for conflict. A bidding war is as intense as a football match, or a rally at Wimbledon, heads turning from one to the other, knowing there can be only one winner.

In short, then, an auction is great theatre and we all like theatre. But there is one thing I would like to change. It does not concern small auctions like the one in Lyttelton this weekend. Rather it concerns the big boy auction, the Sotheby’s number, where a nerveless flunky in white gloves holds aloft a small blue porcelain bowl, and the auctioneer, dapper, smug, knowing all eyes are on him and pleased that they should be, says quietly, undemonstratively, ‘shall we start at five million dollars?’ The camera pans around the room. Of the few people in attendance, none are bidding. The bids are all made by phone, by internet, with proxies standing in for their invisible plutocratic patrons. And when I become president of the world — the time cannot be far away now — that will change. Telephone bidding will be banned. Front up or miss out, you snipe-faced financier, you hedge fund brute. If you want the Ming, the Picasso, the Vermeer you’ll have to slide out from behind your walls of cash, your anonymous Swiss accounts, your yacht the size of Stewart Island, and show your weasel face and stick your hand in the air like an honest man. Come on out, you greedsters. Let’s see you who you are.

• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.