“On Oct.15, 1999, a collective at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, known as the AKSHUN group put the school’s main gallery up for auction on popular internet auction house eBay. The AKSHUN collective auctioned a week of gallery time, or, as they put it, 73,440 minutes of fame.
This sale began as a commentary on pay-to-play gallery spaces and specifically the lottery system for galleries at CalArts and the resulting competitive environment that system led to. The group began promoting the gallery auction at other LA art schools thinking it could be interesting if someone from another school ended up purchasing the space. There was a lot of competition between the art schools in LA at this time and the collective saw this as another layer. They continued to publicize the sale using arts list servers nationally. The space was eventually purchased by Allen Bukoff the director of Fluxus Midwest. He then kept the project going by reselling the gallery space by the square foot and flew out from Michigan to photograph each square foot that he had sold.” (From the Press Release of the auction-intervention by AKSHUN)
KLONDIKE: International Fluxus Group Show at CalArts archive, which was originally auctioned off on eBay by AKSHUN, is archived here: http://www.fluxus.org/FluxusMidwest/klondike/invitation.html
Further reference for the AKSHUN work is at: http://www.robertatkins.net/beta/shift/online/auction.html and http://archive.wired.com/politics/law/news/1999/10/32070?currentPage=all