The Lot is a place for lost objects and found ideas; for things vanished in the before and after of the internet; for classical concepts of beauty and for twenty-first century ways of being. The Lot is so named because we inhabit the site of an auction house, but also because we are interested in everything. Not only in all subjects, but in all time, in decades, centuries—epochs, even.The task of good criticism, according to Samuel Johnson, is “to distinguish those means of pleasing which depend upon known causes and rational deduction, from the nameless and inexplicable elegances which appeal wholly to the fancy.” An Instagram image can be as riveting as an old master painting, and in sifting through the digital superflux of our era, we hope to present the images and ideas—“the nameless and inexplicable elegances”—that soundthe truthof our time.
