The New York Times’s T Magazine has brief profile of ArtCurial’s Fabien Naudan who has been dreaming up all sorts of off-beat auctions to further define the house. One of the more bizarre but also successful has been the sale of foodstuffs:

the house held its first Gastronomie auction last December, the forthcoming Christmas meal perhaps providing the rationale for bids on 48 oysters, six bottles of rare olive oil and a lot Naudan describes simply as “a large piece of meat.” (The best seller at this event was a one-meter-high plaque of pure salt from the Taoudenni mine in Mali, which went to a European collector for more than $4,000 — see, someone is crazier than you.) “Some Champagne bottles didn’t go so high as we thought,” Naudan recounts, but on the other hand, “people really fought for meat and olive oil. It was not my expectation, but it was positive!” He is trying to figure out how to provide a postsale service, because, after all, “if you buy top quality meat, you have to know how to prepare it. A part of our strategy could be to say, ‘Here is the person — a butcher, a chef, a cheese maker — you can contact and they will come to your house to help you.’ ”

Auction Provocateur (T/New York Times)