Selling Artistic Trash Online Gets Complaints
from the seriously? dept
There’s been a lot of talk lately about the large artistic display in New York’s Central Park right now, called “The Gates.” People say it’s quite impressive. However, it’s also created something of an indirect industry in the eBaying of items related to the project. This isn’t that surprising of course. It seems to be par for the course that just about any major news event immediately leads to things being auctioned off on eBay, but apparently, some folks are quite upset about this one. A teenager who was in Central Park asked a worker if he could take one of the card board tubes used to spool the curtains that make up the gates in the display. The worker gave him permission to take one, and he did. The trouble came when he put the item up for sale on eBay, and people started contacting him, insulting him and calling him names. One even claimed to report him to the DA for theft. The kid ended up not selling the tube (he put a huge reserve price on it), but that might just be because he didn’t get enough publicity before the auction ran out. Otherwise, that online casino that seems to buy every high publicity quirky eBay auction probably would have dropped by with a high bid.
