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If, over the past year of quarantine, you’ve found yourself looking around your one-bed, thinking something like: ‘Sure, my pastel Hay crates are chic and my monstera is looking very lush but I just feel like my living room would look so much better if I hung an exceptionally rare dodo bone on the wall’, then we have good news. Your day has finally come!
For an estimated £3,000-£5,000 you can buy that dodo bone at an auction of nearly 100 ‘treasures’ from the Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art and Unnatural History. The extremely weird Hackney institution is selling off the artefacts via Chiswick Auctions in order to stay afloat. The founders say that a difficult year caused by the pandemic has left them ‘heavily indebted’, something they add that they have in common with ‘almost every arts organisation on the planet’. Their solution? To flog some of their creepiest knickknacks.
On sale in the auction? The leg bone of an ‘Irish giant’, some relics of extinct birds, the world’s largest bean pod, a stuffed bat with two heads and a taxidermy ‘winged kitten’, lots of skulls, some spooky dolls and a desiccated baked potato. All sound like totally and not-at-all sinister things to buy.
The online auction has kicked off online now, with viewing by appointment only from May 2 to 6. Prices are expected to range from £100 to thousands of pounds.
These London galleries are open now.
This 1939 letter about London reopening could have been written today.