An auction dilemma rears its head
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Apparently, civil disobedience can be contagious.
News broke today that a man claiming to be the winning bidder at a Paris auction on a $40-million pair of 18th century bronze sculptures won’t pay for his purchase. British and French troops stole the bronze zodiac heads of a rabbit and a rat from an imperial Chinese palace in 1860 during the second Opium War. My colleague, Barbara Demick, reported from Beijing:
... the winning bidder, Cai Mingchao, said he had no intention of paying for the heads, which the Chinese government maintain should be returned as stolen property. ‘I must stress that I do not have the money to pay for this,’ said Cai, an advisor to the National Treasures Fund, which released his statement in Beijing. ‘I think any Chinese citizen would have stood up at that moment. I was merely fulfilling my responsibilities.’ The revelation seems certain to sabotage the sale by Christie’s, which auctioned the heads Wednesday in Paris after Chinese lawyers failed to win an injunction from a French court to block the sale.
Whatever the merits of the case -- a statute of limitations typically applies on such wartime thefts -- Cai’s act of civil disobedience is intriguing.
And familiar.
On Dec. 19, Tim DeChristopher, 27, a senior economics student at the University of Utah, employed the same sham bidding strategy at a federal Bureau of Land Management auction. He placed $1.8 million in fake bids to win oil drilling rights on 22,000 acres of public lands in an effort to keep an eleventh-hour Bush administration plan from going forward. Sounding similarly patriotic, DeChristopher later told Utah’s Daily Herald:
‘I was faced with this ethical dilemma,’ he said. ‘I knew there would be severe consequences. I had just signed this paper that said I understood it was a federal offense to bid without paying. I asked myself if I could live in prison for three years. Can I live with that? Then I asked myself if I could turn my back on this chance and do nothing -- then I am complicit with this destruction. Can I live with that?’
Earlier this month, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar invalidated the auction of the oil-lease parcels.
-- Christopher Knight
