HONG KONG — ART HK 12 wrapped yesterday having scored record attendance and brought the most prestigious slate of participants of any Asian art fair to date. It also proved, however, that the region’s market is by no means easy to crack.

A number of Western galleries invested heavily in ART HK this year, bringing high value works and splashing out on large booths, only to make very modest sales. There were unconfirmed reports of a handful of high-profile players making no sales at the fair at all. Still, marquee participants such as White Cube, Hauser & Wirth, and David Zwirner did report good results, while local players like Platform China and de Sarthe Gallery — who draw on long experience in Asia —  also did well.

Notable sales over the course of the fair included Alighiero Boetti’s “Mappa” (1984) for €1 million by Tornabuoni Art; Robert Motherwell’s “Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 45” (1960) for $1 million by Bernard Jacobson Gallery; George Baselitz’s “Stalin und Woroschilov pissen von der Kremlmover” by White Cube to an Asian collector for €500,000 and Hans Hartung’s “T1966-H32” (1966) by de Sarthe to a Singaporean collector for $400,000.

For many participants, the most disappointing feature of this year’s edition of ART HK was the relatively low number of major collectors in attendance. Various theories for their absence were mooted, the most convincing of these being the misjudgement in scheduling that un-coupled the fair this year from the main spring auctions. In previous years ART HK has benefited from an overlap with the Christie’s Hong Kong auction season which brings a host of prominent Asian collectors to the city. This year there was a week-long gap between the fair and the auctions, thereby robbing the former of its synergy with the latter. 

Making up in some measure for the lack of fly-ins, Hong Kong collectors were more in evidence this year, an encouraging development for the raft of galleries who have recently chosen to set up shop in the city.

Also encouraging were the number of private museum owners and directors from the region who attended. Institutions like the new Sifang Art Museum in Nanjing are looking to build collections of Western art and more than one gallerist expressed satisfaction at having established contact with them as a result of the fair.

A number of participants who had failed to break even this year still professed themselves sanguine at fair’s end. They believe the potential in the Asian market is vast and that ART HK provides a good place to begin to make the contacts that are vital to tapping that market. It was hard to find anyone not planning to return next year when the fair will be reborn under the umbrella of Art Basel.

PARIS — Last Wednesday at Artcurial's modern books and manuscripts sale in Paris, a French collector won a recently-discovered two-page draft of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's "The Little Prince." After eight bidders (including six telephone bidders) engaged in a ten-minute bidding war, the manuscript sold for €385,600 ($494,000) including buyer's premium — almost ten times its low estimate. Considering that the draft consists of two almost illegible handwritten pages, the stratospheric price is a clear sign of the power that this iconic text holds over collectors' imaginations.

All told, 30 lots of manuscripts by Saint-Exupéry fetched €1.4 million ($1.8 million), more than doubling their combined €600,000 estimate. The lot containing six chapters of "Pilote de Guerre" ("War Pilot"), totaling 124 pages, was purchased by another French collector for €311,200 ($400,000), surpassing its estimate of €250,000. A South American collector snapped up "Escales en Patagonie" ("Stopping in Patagonia"), a 24-page autographed manuscript from 1932, for €162,500 ($208,000), or more than triple its €50,000 low estimate.

But the most unusual find was the top lot, the two handwritten pages of "The Little Prince," Saint-Exupéry's bestseller, which has been translated into 267 languages. The document was discovered by Artcurial experts Olivier Devers and Benoît Puttemans in a packet of letters and manuscripts consigned by a collector, and it contains a different version of chapters seventeen and nineteen. Devers estimates that it was written in 1941, while Saint-Exupéry, a pilot active in the Resistance, was in exile in New York. In this version of the story, after visiting six planets, the little prince arrives on an alternate-reality earth. One particular line reads as an homage to the melting pot of New York City: "If you brought together all the inhabitants of this planet close together as if for a meeting, the Whites, the Yellows, the Blacks, the children, the elderly, the women, and the men, without forgetting a single one, all of humanity would fit on Long Island."

The definitive manuscript of "The Little Prince" is in the Morgan Library's collection, donated by Sylvia Hamilton Reinhardt, a New York journalist. Saint-Exupéry was in love with her and gave her his manuscript in 1943, shortly before his mission to North Africa, from which he never returned. In 1944, while flying reconnaissance for the Resistance off the southern coast of France, his plane crashed. In 1948 Saint-Exupéry was officially recognized as having died for France as a war veteran.

This story originally appeared on ARTINFO France.

“When you hear the name ‘Chaplin,’ you’re going to think comedy,” says Tom Meehan. “But it’s not really comedy. There’s very little comedy in it. The big trauma of his life was his mother going mad.” 

Meehan is talking about “Chaplin,” the musical, bowing on Broadway this fall, he has written with composer Chris Curtis about the legendary silent-film comic. It’s a surprising admission: Like “Chaplin,” the name “Meehan,” brings to mind comedy, too. The former New Yorker writer is a great American humorist, winning three Tony Awards as the librettist for “Annie,” “The Producers,” and (with Mark O’Donnell) “Hairspray.” With that track record, he’s very much in demand. He has three shows coming this fall: “Chaplin,” a highly-anticipated Broadway revival of “Annie,” and the world premiere, in Hamburg, Germany, of “Rocky, Das Musical.” (While Sylvester Stallone claims co-writing credit on this musical version of his 1976 film classic, it’s really Meehan’s baby.)

“Chaplin,” however, is providing the greatest challenges. Not only is Meehan taking on a film icon, but the Chaplin estate  is also putting pressure on him to tone down one aspect of the show: The tragedy of Hannah, Charlie’s mother. A young beauty with London stage ambitions, she was seduced by an older man, who whisked her off to South Africa during the 1890s gold rush. He impregnated and abandoned her there in short order. Only twenty, she turned to prostitution to earn passage back to England for her and her illegitimate son, Sydney. A case of syphilis would ultimately turn her mad. Chaplin, who was sent off to a workhouse at seven, was traumatized. “He spent his whole life looking for the love that his mother could never give him,” says Meehan. “You have to go into [the history] if you want to justify, to some extent, that all his early loves were sixteen or seventeen.  He was fixated on this beautiful young woman.” 

The long-gestating musical had a 2010 La Jolla Playhouse run under the title of “Limelight,” which drew crowds despite middling reviews.  Meehan says that the musical has since undergone major revisions for Broadway. Rob McClure, who received glowing notices at La Jolla, will once again star as the Little Tramp. Meehan spoke to us about  the risks of “Chaplin,” why the 1997 revival of “Annie” was a flop, and how “Rocky” may yet succeed, despite widespread skepticism.

Are you getting the Chaplin estate to see it your way?
I haven’t as yet. They’re pretty upset by it. But what was interesting about Chaplin’s life was that an awful lot of his big pictures were about his mother. In “City Lights,” the tramp goes to great efforts to get money to help the blind girl get her sight back. That was wish fulfillment on Chaplin’s part, to restore his mother to sanity. In “Gold Rush,” he rescues this girl who is a kind of hooker in a saloon. And in “The Kid,” he rescues the kid from being sent away to an orphanage, which parallels his own being sent away as a child.  

How aware was Chaplin of his mother’s checkered past, especially since she was apparently in and out of his life a great deal?
He learned  the details in a letter from an aunt when he was about sixteen. He had photographs of her as a beautiful young woman and this is who he had in mind when he went looking for someone to marry. The first two were gold-digging starlet types [ Mildred Harris and Lita Grey].  But his last wife, Oona, was, like Chaplin — quite complicated.

She was 18 at the time; he was 54, and in the midst of a sensational paternity trial with yet another young woman.
Her father [playwright Eugene O’Neill] threw her out when she went  off with Chaplin. But they had eight kids and stay married for thirty-four years. His life is so fascinating, his genius, everything. I don’t know if we’ll ever get it up on stage ... the first act is his rise to fame and the second act is his decline.

How did you get involved?
Well, it’s sort of like a poker game that you keep staying in for another hand. Chris [Curtis] was a pianist at Chez Josephine Restaurant on theater row, and he was playing songs from this show he’d written about Chaplin. Mindy Rich [a producer] and her husband came into the restaurant, heard the songs and fell in love with the idea. Chris pursued me and I first came on as a mentor. Then they convinced me to write with Chris. And then I was going to quit and they asked me to write by myself and run drafts by Chris. I just kept staying in for another round, and now Broadway. Yikes!

James Lapine, who is directing the new revival of “Annie,” is known for his dark palette. Are we likely to see a more serious take?
It’s not darker, but it is different. He has a great ability to direct actors and to discover the subtleties of the text. “Annie” wasn’t written for children, it was written for adults.  There’s an awful lot of politics in it. The Great Depression, the scenes in Hooverville, and the founding of the New Deal. We wrote it in 1972, three liberal Democrats responding to our deep dislike of Nixon. We thought, “Let’s write a musical about a President who cared about the country.” That was FDR [Franklin Roosevelt], and we put that in the context of the comic strip. Adults came to see the show and then brought their kids to it.

Why was the 1997 revival of “Annie” such a debacle?
Everything went wrong with it.  Nell Carter [who played Miss Hannigan] turned out to be a terrible mistake. She’d been a great comic presence in “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and in a sitcom [“Gimme a Break”]. But she didn’t really have a good sense of comedy.  She couldn’t get a laugh. And she had all sorts of problems with weight and other personal problems.

What did you think of Carol Burnett’s Miss Hannigan in the  movie?
She was fantastic but so over the top and out of control. People have the idea that Miss Hannigan is some kind of crazy drunk.  But she has to cope with all these problems. She has all the responsibilities of motherhood and none of the pleasures, so she takes a nip every now and then. The children, these tough little mugs, run the orphanage and she’s their victim.

Why did you want to work on “Rocky”?
When Sylvester Stallone first mentioned it to me, I thought, This is an absurd idea. But as I studied it more I realized that it has the kind of things that I always look for in a musical: a character who is larger than life who takes a journey. He wants to be somebody. And it’s a love story. It’s very autobiographical. He was an actor who had nothing going for him, so he wrote this. He says that he did it in three days.

Are we going to see the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and hear “Gonna Fly Now”?
Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty have written wonderful songs — they’ve even managed  to write a song for an inarticulate Rocky. But yes, that song will also be in the show.  The sets are now being figured out, but we will have a big fight scene at the end, and we do have a  full-scale boxing ring. I know that people are thinking, “Oh my god! ‘Rocky 8,’ the musical.” They can hardly wait to see a fiasco! But it’s very heartfelt.  

Read more on theater in Play by Play

Duncan Jones, the director of the science-fiction movies “Moon” and “Source Code,” said at Cannes that he will be making an action-driven biopic of Ian Fleming, the creator of 007. Variety reports that the movie is being adapted by Matt Brown from Andrew Lycett’s 1995 biography “Ian Fleming, the Man Behind James Bond.”

The timing of the announcement coincides with the release of the trailer for the twenty-third Bond picture, Sam Mendes’s “Skyfall,” which is being released in the US on November 9. The brooding, staccato clip, which is mostly nocturnal (and which you can watch below), features Daniel Craig’s icy Bond playing a word-association game, being shaved by “Eve” (Naomie Harris), declaring that he’ll kill some killers before they kill “us,” and some explosions.

“Fleming,” as it’s tentatively titled, will depict the future novelist’s experiences as a British naval intelligence officer during World War II. The project was once considered as a vehicle for the Scottish actor James McAvoy. Thirty years ago, Charles Dance would have been perfect casting because of his physical resemblance to Fleming in young middle-age.

“Fleming lived through one of the most perilous periods in world history, in a position that allowed him a unique vantage point on all the players, all the stakes," Jones told the Hollywood Reporter. “He witnessed true heroism first-hand. And he saw the evil men could do. Then, when the war ended, he went off to write fiction. The essential question for me is where did Ian Fleming end and Bond begin? Fleming (1908-64) was educated at Durnford School (near the estate owned by the descendants of the Elizabethan spy John Bond, whose motto was “The world is not enough”) and at Eton, by when he already had a car and mistress. As a journalist in his early twenties, he covered the Stalinist show trial of six British engineers in Moscow, and later worked unsuccessfully as a banker and stockbroker.

In August 1939, with war imminent, Fleming joined naval intelligence and started concocting schemes for deceiving the Nazis.  Among them was the plan for Operation Mincemeat, which he borrowed from a 1930s crime novel and which involved the use of a corpse of an RAF pilot whose  pockets contained disinformation; it became the source for the 1956 film “The Man Who Never Was.” Incredibly, Fleming also wrote a blueprint for an early version of the CIA.

In 1942, he formed No. 30 Commando, a unit of British intelligence commandos to seize documents from enemy headquarters on the front lines. Although Fleming did visit his men in the field on at least one occasion, he didn’t lead their missions personally but directed them remotely – a hindrance to a heroic portrait that Jones and Brown may or may not feel inclined to ignore when they make their movie.

As Germeny faced defeat, Fleming formed T (for target) Force to gather intelligence from liberated countries. He completed his war service in the Far East.

T-Force’s operations formed the basis of “Moonraker,” the third of his 12 Bond novels. He was writing for the London Sunday Times when he began writing his Bond stories in 1952. The first novel, “Casino Royale,” was published in 1953 and was an instant success. By then, he was spending three months of every year at Goldeneye, his estate in Jamaica, where he befriended Noel Coward, among others.

In 1953, he married the socialite Ann Charteris, who had twice been married to barons; she and Fleming has been conducting an affair since the mid-'30s. The cruelty that underpins Bond’s relationship with women is traceable to Fleming’s relationship with Charteris, of which flagellation, bullying, and sadomasochism were welcome components, as the Daily Mail reported in 2008. 

In case the Fleming movie incorporates this aspect, Michael Fassbender and Keira Knightley, whose Carl Gustav Jung and Sabine Spielrein had a spanking relationship in “A Dangerous Method,” may want to rule themselves out of the running, lest they should be typecast. 

And if Jones is looking for a better title than "Fleming" for the movie, he could do worse than the Bond-ian "The Man Who Sold the World," the title of his father David Bowie's song and third album.

Below: Ian Fleming discusses the origins of James Bond's name

Bottom: The Trailer for "Skyfall"

NEW YORK — It's a case of public art gone horribly awry. Friends and colleagues of Takeshi Miyakawa have taken to Facebook to ask supporters to volunteer their character descriptions of the 50-year-old Japanese artist and designer in the hope of proving that he is not a terrorist, after his unauthorized tribute to his adopted city got him thrown in jail. “I believe this was a gross misunderstanding,” his attorney Deborah Blum told the New York Times, adding that Judge Martin P. Murphy intended to hold Miyakawa until he had undergone a psychological evaluation.

The trouble began on Friday afternoon, when passersby noticed a plastic bag stamped with the ever-popular “I ♥ NY” logo that appeared to be taped to a tree branch near the corner of Bedford Avenue and North 5th Street in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The bag, one of many that Miyakawa had hung from trees and lampposts around Brooklyn, contained a glowing LED light that would allow it to glow at night like a Chrismas tree ornament. Though the works were intended to express the artist's love of the city where he has lived since 1989, the NYPD had a different interpretation: Fearing the wired-up bag contained explosives, emergency service vehicles cordoned off the block where the bag was hanging, asked businesses to close, and ordered residents to leave their apartments.

Gothamist is now reporting that the person who made the first report of the plastic bag didn't even believe it to be a bomb, but had originally called 311 to simply “get that thing off my tree.”

Describing Miyakawa as a "sane, kind, and gentle human being," fellow artist Louis Lim has recounted the details of Miyakawa's arraignment with a palpable degree of disdain. In an email to ARTINFO, he now writes that Judge Murphy denied his friend bail against the recommendation of both the prosecutor and the arresting officer. “This is a ridiculous sentence that essentially denies him the opportunity to defend the charges he's on in the first place,” he told ARTINFO. “Furthermore, the paperwork of this mental health thing means an ambiguous incarceration time. We just want that mental evaluation dropped so he can get out.”

At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, 23 works screen in competition for the 65th Palme d’Or. And while this collection of flicks is sure to include some new classics, there’s just one problem with watching them all: In the dark of the theater, no one can see what you’re wearing. Over the decades, the world’s most famous celebration of new movies has come to be cherished by the fashionistas as much as it’s cherished by the cinéastes, and every premiere red carpet, photocall, and after party is mobbed with photographers and paparazzi. The pictures are then sent out all over the world.

So what have these image dispatches told us so far? Halfway into the festival, we take a look at the hits, misses, trends, and triumphs of the red carpets of Cannes.

Click on the slide show to see fashion highlights from the Cannes Film Festival.

NEW YORK — After 26 years of designing restaurants in New York City, David Rockwell has become a go-to for gourmands. The architect is behind the atmosphere — an integral part of a good dining experience, and an essential component of a Zagat's rating — at such foodie paradises as Maialino, A Voce, and Adour Alain Ducasse. This weekend, however, Rockwell showed off his set-design skills at Googa Mooga, the massive two-day outdoor food festival that debuted Saturday in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. He effectively provided the vendors a stage, giving the event a performing arts treatment more akin to his set for the recent Broadway revival of "Hairspray" than the interior of Nobu. 

"Googa Mooga has kind of a carny implication," Rockwell said during a Saturday preview of the grounds. Carnival kitsch pervaded the rolling, Frederick Law Olmstead-designed Nethermead meadow, including a pillar-sized Dayglow orange four-tiered cake; the URBarn, a framework of red metal depicting something between the silhouette of a barn and an urban cityscape; and a giant steel pig marked "Hamageddon," a Burning Man artist-designed homage to both bacon and heavy metal (basically, all the kind of goofy landmarks that make ideal meeting places when you get separated from your friends). Despite the pop whimsy, "We wanted it to not feel like it landed from another planet," Rockwell said, "so that's why there’s an urban aesthetic to a lot of it as well."

Rather than uniform stalls for the food vendors, each was outfitted with a unique awning and painted façade ranging from bright blue stripes to faded graffiti and deep burgundy bricks. Inspired by the storefronts of New York, the goal was "funkiness and diversity." "If you look at a city strip, there’s so much variety," said Rockwell. "When you look at festivals they don’t have any of that. This is a way to take that variety  and express that so that every vendor gets a cool individual piece that's part of an ensemble." 

To enhance the communal spirit, the grounds were dotted with long countertops designed to look like police barricades and be shared by ferocious foodies. Nothing was closed off: rather than placing bars inside the perimeter of a four-walled tent, the design team placed them in aisles at the center of open pavilions, letting in the park on all sides. The bars' copper-topped counters were meant to start showing their age within a few years — assuming all goes according to plan and the fair is still around. Everything was designed to be disassembled and stored to last for the future Googa Mooga performances. "One of my keen interests is the intersection between theater and architecture," Rockwell said. "Everyone loves it when the circus comes to town. There’s something exciting about the arrival of it. There's going got be more need of performances that can come and go."

How many more times Googa Mooga will come to Prospect Park remains to be seen. What was a rollicking good time for some was an overcrowded fiasco for others. Saturday, those who attended early got to snag food from the likes of Luke's Lobster Roll and the Spotted Pig before the booths were swamped with lines and many purveyors ran out of food (ARTINFO, luckily, was part of the early set). But, those who attended later were treated to a superb performance by the Roots, who caught the last sliver of light as the sun set over the Nethermead Meadow. Those who splurged for the Extra Mooga VIP passes got to spend an explicative-peppered hour asking culinary polemicist Anthony Bourdain questions, and watched former LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy perform a DJ set late into the night, until his diamond-shaped disco ball was lowered, dismantled, and packed away until the next Googa Mooga.

To see highlights from the debut Googa Mooga, including the architecture, Silent Disco, and an extensive Q&A with Anthony Bourdain, click the slide show.  

After graduating in 2000 with a BFA in experimental animation from CalArts, Los Angeles-based artist Allison Schulnik thought she would go on to work for the Cartoon Network. Instead, she wound up doing random animation gigs supplemented by income from menial jobs for a few years before deciding to show her book around. Nobody responded, until curator Hubert Schmalix from the now-shuttered Black Dragon Society gallery in L.A. called her in 2005 to show some paintings there. Curators took notice of the imaginative characters that made up her macabre fantasia, and she began to exhibit regularly.

But Schulnik never forgot her animation roots. In 2008, she produced a claymation short entitled “Hobo Clown,” featuring “Granny Diner” by Brooklyn-based indie rock band Grizzly Bear. The group showed their admiration for Schulnik’s work, hiring her to direct the haunting figures made of colorful gobs of clay in their 2009 music video “Ready, Able.” Last year, the cat-obsessed artist had an oil-thick solo exhibition at New York’s ZieherSmith Gallery that consisted of several feline paintings.

Schulnik’s personal style first caught our eye while walking through the VIP Vernissage at this year’s Armory Show. Her colorful flair for vintage clothing and funky accessories embodied an artistic Southern California cool aesthetic. For this edition of the Tastemaker, Schulnik — who is gearing up for an ocean-themed exhibition, “Salty Air,” which opens May 26 at Mark Moore Gallery in Los Angeles — takes us through her favorite red lipstick and cat-emblazoned platform shoes. 

Click on the slide show to see Allison Schulnik’s Tastemaker picks.

Did the Facebook stock go out of style in less than a day?

After an opening day marked first by a delay and then by a dip, Facebook’s IPO ended up at a price of $38.23 by the time trading closed. And things haven’t improved. It peaked at $45 a share Friday afternoon and by today it was trading at around $35. The downturn has the fashion industry in the same boat as all other industries sweating over Facebook’s ability to turn around global markets.

The public offering seems to have hurt other major online retailers. An article in WWD notes that shares of Amazon dropped 2.1 percent, to $213.85 a share, and eBay dropped 1.7 percent, to $38.36 a share.

It’s hard to see how the topsy-turvy first day will impact the company, investors, and the other businesses that rely on Facebook in a variety of ways. It may not matter much at all. What’s more immediate is that the company will have an influx of cash that can be used to develop more advanced interfaces, acquire more competitors, and add more in-house apps

And the fact that the public owns part of Facebook won’t affect the control that Mark Zuckerberg has over the company. In his column in this week’s New Yorker, James Surowiecki explains that though Zuckerberg only owns 18 percent of the total shares, his count for more — the company stock was sold under a dual-class system, with one portion holding much more weight than the other. Zuckerberg’s shares fall into this superior class, so he actually controls 57 percent of the voting shares. Yahtzee!

With all this taken into consideration, how will the dip in value for other online retailers, the bungee-jumping first day for Facebook, and Zuckerberg’s controlling voting power affect the fashion industry? No one can say for sure, but WWD still took it upon itself to consult a few designers on the topic.

“To Mark Zuckerberg: Congratulations, well done!” said Leonard Lauder, chairman emeritus of the Estée Lauder. “Just remember: When looking at all the other people in your space that nothing stays golden forever. Start thinking about tomorrow today.”

Donna Karan was fairly modest.

“He doesn’t need our advice — he should advise us,” she said. “Really, though, there are so many things that need help in this world, and he can help, and help us, make the big changes.”

And Michael Kors felt the need to defend one part of Zuckerberg’s persona that has been critically maligned in some parts of the fashion industry: his fondness for the hoodie.

“Don’t pay attention to fashion naysayers, Mr. Zuckerberg!” the designer said. “I wore black crewnecks, black jackets, and jeans before my IPO and I continue to do so after. It’s your talent, vision, and performance that people are interested in.”

As a screenwriter, Paul Schrader may have created two of the greatest working-class heroes of post-war America cinema in “Taxi Driver”’s Travis Bickle and “Raging Bull”’s Jake LaMotta, but as he showed with his 1985 Yukio Mishima biopic, he has a taste for exotica, too. Anne Thompson reports on ToH! that, among other projects Schrader has in the works, he is writing an English-language Russian film about the prima ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska (1872-1971), known after marriage as Her Serene Highness Princess Romonova-Krasinskaya. Read the full article on Spotlight, the culture blog.

It's an open secret that it's much more lucrative to be a former president than a sitting one. In addition to book tours and astronomical speaking fees, add selling "flecks of dried blood" to the list of ways to capitalize on a popular presidency. PFCAuctions, a Channel Islands-based online auction house, has listed a vial of dried blood on its Web site, claiming that the substance came from the late president Ronald Reagan and was extracted during his hospitalization in the aftermath of the 1981 assassination attempt on his life. The seller's mother allegedly took it, with permission, from a blood lab in Maryland where she worked at the time, according to the AP.

The macabre lot does not sit well with the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation in California. The executive director called it a "craven act" and is threating to use legal means to take it off the market. But the seller has quite the Reaganesque view on the situation. According a statement on the auction house Web site, the seller stated, "I was a real fan of Reaganomics and felt that Pres. Reagan himself would rather see me sell it rather than donating it."

As we were perusing the PFCAuctions site, however, we realized that the real question here is not whether this is actually Reagan's blood, but rather, "What if this is not the strangest lot in this auction?" Also on offer is a clump of hair from tween heartthrob Justin Bieber, a painting done by rockstar Pete Doherty in blood, and — we kid you not — an actual prototype of the V2 rocket. 

Click on the slide show and decide for yourself which is the weirdest item available from PFCAuctions.

In the four days since Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg announced on his Facebook page that he tied the knot with Priscilla Chan, his girlfriend of nine years, a lot has changed. He switched his status to married, posting a photograph of himself in a black tie and suit, standing alongside his new bride, who looked angelic in her Claire Pettibone laser-cut floral wedding gown and veil. So far, the post has garnered more than 1.2 million likes, the most ever for Zuckerberg, and also turned Chan into an unwilling fashion star.

Call it the Priscilla Chan effect. The picture that marked the surprise nuptials sent thousands of brides-to-be into a frenzied search for the $4,700 wedding dress, known as “Sky Between the Branches.” The L.A.-based designer was bombarded with phone calls Sunday and Monday. Bridal shops tweeted that they had the Claire Pettibone gown, which is embellished with matte sequins lined in silk, in stock. Even more telling, the designer’s Web site experienced a surge in traffic, jumping from its average 1,500 unique visitors to 26,000 on Monday, reported WWD.

We saw this last year when Kate Middleton married Prince William. Her Alexander McQueen gown spawned endless copies and everybody wanted a royal wedding. But this was the woman who was marrying the future King of England, not a Silicon Valley tech billionaire.

Why would women want to follow in Chan’s fashion footsteps? Her style sense, while sharper than her husband’s trademark hoodies, consists of basic T-shirts, skirts, flip-flops, and summery dresses. It’s not bad, just not remarkable. Perhaps it’s the contrast between Chan’s regular sartorial selections and her wedding day ensemble that intrigued the thousands who visited Pettibone’s Web site. She looked stunning at her wedding — exactly what every bride-to-be wants on her special day.

The low-key Chan, who just graduated from medical school, even kept her dress shopping under wraps, ordering it from a bridal salon. The designer, who has made dresses for celebrities like “Mad Men” actress Elisabeth Moss, only discovered her newfound stardom when her husband noticed the gown after he saw the news that Zuckerberg and Chan had wed – they suspect that the dress was ordered under a fake name, according to BuzzFeed Shift. At just under $5,000 the dress is on the pricier side, but still within reach for some and practically a bargain for Chan, whose husband is worth about $19 billion following Facebook’s IPO. Chan could have easily afforded a designer known for high-profile wedding dresses, like Vera Wang or even Alexander McQueen.

Copies are likely to follow — Pettibone’s Italian fabric supplier contacted her company to “to warn them that another designer wanted to purchase the exact fabric of Chan’s gown, but, lucky for Claire, she has the exclusive rights to that particular beaded fabric,” reported WWD.

Has the Facebook wedding dress catapulted Chan into fashion icon status? We think it’s unlikely, but the coming months will tell – perhaps her outfits will spark sudden Internet traffic spikes, causing dresses to go flying out of stores.