"EMPTY TUBE OF TOOTHPASTE -- $41.63. Buy It Now!"
Huh? This seller must be crazy, you think to yourself. Or maybe an empty tube of toothpaste is just what you're looking for. Whatever the reason, you click on the profile, and up pops a photo of a "rare, hard-to-find" gently used tube of Colgate.
"EMPTY TUBE OF TOOTHPASTE makes for a dandy birthday gift," reads the ad. "I can more or less guarantee that it will leave the recipient speechless and confused, especially if this is a sensitive loved one, or a new paramour."
And should you ever run out, "EMPTY TUBE OF TOOTHPASTE still has a little bit of toothpaste left in it for emergency use."
Well, the last part's not quite true. If you continue reading, you will notice that, as with DIRTY TOOTHBRUSH, WORN OUT HAIRBRUSH, FALLING APART SNOW PANTS, GRUNGY HIKING BOOTS and the many more strange items for sale at this on-line store, EMPTY TUBE OF TOOTHPASTE is actually a high-quality, photographic print of the ad, signed by the artist. Mind you, there have been some peeved, serious-minded eBay shoppers who haven't been amused.
Meet Neal Livingston of Mabou, N.S., a 58-year-old maker of independent films, electricity and maple syrup who is currently using the world's largest on-line flea market as an incidental gallery for a new media project titled, appropriately enough, Junky Old Stuff.
About four months ago, Livingston was roaming around eBay, looking for something (what, he won't say). His girlfriend had recently bid on an item, which she did not end up acquiring. But as is customary, the helpful service-support workers at eBay had sent her a list of other items they thought she might be interested in. The list included what Livingston describes as "a really bad pair of shoes."
"Something clicked," recalls Livingston, who had been thinking of doing some sort of Internet-based art project for about five years.
"The idea was to make a piece about consumerism as a way of life, and have it be funny too." Using eBay as a platform, Livingston was able to play around with the influence of Ad-speak. Having to make his artworks conform to the rules of the eBay Web site, he says, "is like a paradigm for how individuals do or do not fit well into this new world order."
Of course, the world of eBay can sometimes be a little whacked. Recall the book published last summer Found on eBay: 101 Genuinely Bizarre Items from the World's Online Yard Sale. Author Marc Hartzman, an advertising copywriter who edits a small humour magazine, came up with the idea for the book while searching for items for his collection of circus-freak and sideshow memorabilia. Among the items he reprinted, along with the amusing sales pitches, were canned deer dung, a human soul, used dentures, a bracelet made from goat toenails, a JFK garden gnome and a Connecticut woman's colonoscopy photos.
The ad for a human soul read: "This is an auction for [the] soul of one of my friends. He, being an atheist, bet his soul . . . in a game of Golden Eye on N64. Too bad for him, he lost and now his soul is mine, but it can be yours!"
Unfortunately, eBay officials closed down that particular auction. "If the soul does not exist, eBay could not allow the auctioning of the soul because there would be nothing to sell," they explained. "However, if the soul does exist, then, in accordance with eBay's policy on human parts and remains, we would not allow the auctioning of human souls."
Hartzman and his readers aren't the only ones who have made a hobby out of mocking the seemingly endless stream of weird things found on eBay. Shauna Wright and Drue Miller are the San Francisco Web designers who created http://www.whowouldbuythat.com . For the past three years, they have patrolled eBay, hunting for tacky treasures to highlight on their own site.
Last week's featured items included: a miniature clothesline for lawn geese (the latest twist on garden gnomes, one would presume), the "dogsucker" (a pet-grooming vacuum attachment), a giant dust bunny (shaped as a life-sized rabbit), a stuffed and mounted deer butt, an eight-inch Tampon Doll and an Elvis package that included a piece of the departed King's tooth, a lock of his hair and a gold record. How they got around eBay's restriction on human remains, we'll never know, but it was a bust anyway -- the tooth failed to attract the minimum starting bid of $100,000 (U.S.) by the time the auction closed.
Wright and Miller say they are often contacted and thanked by the sellers they feature. "Getting onto our site has gotten to be a status symbol of sorts," Wright once told a reporter. But the gals apparently have some ground rules. A notice on their site asks their contributors to refrain from sending adult "novelty" items, anything with the words "fart" or "gag" in the title, kangaroo scrotum purses, used undergarments, joke auctions ("unless they're really funny") and the guy offering to "kick your ass."
"We've seen these a zillion times already, really."
Wright compares eBay to "short-attention-span theatre." "People can visit, see a bunch of items, laugh and be on their way."
While Livingston hopes to amuse, he does consider Junky Old Stuff a serious art project. "There's a level of real public art here. It's great that I could find this platform that allows me to run into the general public and people who may not go to an art gallery and see the work. It's not just confined to a narrow community of artists."
Livingston isn't the first artist to use eBay as a stage. Chris Donlay, a rep from eBay's communications department, recalls John Freyer, of Iowa, who listed all of his personal belongings and then travelled to the new homes of all his former possessions to visit them and interview the people who bought them. He's written a book about it called All My Life for Sale.
"He was a performance artist," said Donlay, who adds that the U.S. eBay site is a "barometer of popular culture. "We're always amazed. Some of them are perfectly legit and fascinating."
The winds of fortune have not, however, managed to carry eBay into the rarified world of high culture. In an attempt to broaden its appeal beyond bobble heads and Beanie Babies, eBay purchased the venerable Butterfield & Butterfield Auctioneers Corp. in 1999. Two years later, the company opened eBay Premier, a site for high-priced art, antiques and collectibles.
Sales were slow to take off. Last summer, the company sold Butterfield and folded eBay Premier, after starting a joint auction site with Sotheby's. The results of the second venture were no better. Three months ago, Sotheby's pulled out of the agreement, although it continues to use eBay's live bidding technology for its on-line auctions.
It's perhaps not so surprising that eBay has had better luck facilitating conceptual art forms over conventional, given that the auction site was first launched in 1995 by a software developer and Web-site hobbyist as a means of helping his girlfriend meet, auction and trade with fellow Pez-dispenser enthusiasts -- true story! There's a folksy element about eBay that somehow seems more suited to experimental forms of contemporary art. Take Karen Thornton, for instance. The professor of art and technology at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, who once sold a collection of dust from the air vents of a funeral home as part of an on-line art exhibition two years ago. Her other entries included a broken glass vase partially repaired by Krazy Glue, 150 used tea bags, asparagus and a dead bird.
The fuzzy grey funeral pile was the only item that sold. It was purchased, for $1, by Joel Brand, president of an Internet startup that connects buyers and sellers of media content. He told a reporter at the time that he hadn't realized the dust was part of an art exhibit.
"I actually had no idea why this person was selling dust," said Brand. "I didn't know if it was really from a funeral home or not. It didn't really matter. To me, it seemed like someone having fun, and I thought I could add to that by stepping up and buying it."
Thornton was shocked that someone actually bought her dust. But Livingston is seriously hoping someone will buy his work, which will be available on eBay for another couple of weeks. There have been no real bidders yet, other than the 25 friends he convinced to buy one of his prints so he had the requisite number of sales needed for a home-page seller's profile.
He has, however, had thousands of hits -- almost 7,000 from the U.K. eBay site alone, and it's only been up for one week. The Canadian site received 3,000 hits in its first three days.
"The American page isn't really rocking the same way. The humour doesn't seem to translate as well."
While most responses from fellow Canadians and Brits have been congratulatory, many Americans were incensed -- or confused.
"I'd just like to know, what planet do you live on?" replied one U.S. shopper. "WHY WOULD ANYONE BUY AN EMPTY TUBE OF TOOTHPASTE???? I DON'T KNOW WHERE IT COMES FROM, I WOULDN'T GIVE YOU A PENNY!!" wrote another.
Livingston's favourite piece of buyer-seller correspondence came from Saskatchewan.
"How much if I buy all 900 . . . ??? How much will the shipping be per tube . . . ??? Can I pick it up at your home at 2:00 AM . . . ??? Thanks Mark."
Livingston says he laughed hysterically at that one. "The fact that people responded to the quantity was completely beyond my conception."
Next week, he's plans to list DIRTY OLD COAT in eBay's "mature" adult-novelty section. "I think it will be very, very funny to see what kind of hits that gets."
