Auction houses [ Trade ]
… to Town’. 8 The auction house pursued this ideal of sociable parity and community, making it the very motor of its spectacle, as bids that settled the price and ownership of artefacts were supposedly taken from the crowd … lots he attributed both fuelled polite conversation and provided the décor for sociable meetings. Auction doubled as a spectacle where people looked at unique artefacts while observing how other bidders’ appraised them, prompted by the … to ensure that sales did not translate into loss. There remained powerful anxieties around the participation in such a spectacle of greed, financial dispersion and old money pitted against new money – these powerful currents threatened …
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