In order to find vast quantities of merchandise to feed the theoretically insatiable appetite of Internet buyers, along with the necessary guarantees of authenticity and quality, Redden came up with the idea of signing up thousands of the dealers around the world upon whom Christie's and Sotheby's depend for much of their business. Redden persuaded Dede Brooks of the necessity to sign them up fast. And to corral the dealers whose names would lend prestige to the venture, Brooks personally scurried around Manhattan's Upper East Side in her chauffeur-driven limousine, signing up recruits.

Richard Feigen, one of Manhattan's most exalted fine-art dealers, received one such visit. "I'd promised Dede I would participate," he recalls, "so when she ran over to my office to sign me up, I said, 'Okay, Dede,' and gave her my name. But I didn't think much about it at the time."

Feigen is not holding his breath for dazzling online results. Asked to supply an object for the first postings on sothebys.com in January, he selected a painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, the eighteenth-century portraitist. "I didn't know what to put on there, frankly," Feigen says. "I mean, we don't have any garbage-y Picassos or Chagalls or anything like that."

During the three weeks the Reynolds portrait appeared on sothebys.com, Feigen received just two responses -- a woman calling to report that she was married to a descendant of the sitter and a man in the Midwest offering to pony up half of the low estimate. "Those were the only two contacts we had," Feigen says. "But we weren't expecting anything anyway, so it really didn't matter to me."

"It makes you wonder what Sotheby's is thinking," notes a dealer in Chelsea. "Sothebys-dot-Amazon-dot-com -- it sounds like Hermès-dot-Kmart-dot-com."

Feigen's partner, Frances Beatty, adds, laughing: "The Internet is sort of like a Pandora's box that exposes us to the kind of people that Richard has spent 30 years trying to eliminate from our radar."

Noting that roughly 30 percent of all the property sold at Sotheby's live auctions goes to absentee bidders who have presumably seen the object only in a catalogue, Redden counters: "If you live in New York or London, it's not difficult to get to an exhibition. But if you live in Chicago or Hong Kong, you're obviously out of the running unless you can afford the time to travel there to touch and feel it."

Christie's, meanwhile, has taken a radically different approach to the Internet, having decided not to sign on with a major online retailer. Explaining the move, an executive told the Times, "We made a decision to protect the integrity of our brand name." The idea of working with an outside team to sell high-volume, low-value merchandise, he added, "didn't make commercial sense . . . We seek greater efficiency and market share at the top end of the business."

While Christie's decision to remove itself from the fray of high-volume, low-value online auctions may turn out to be profitable, it has prompted a considerable exodus of executives and experts from the 234-year-old company, lured by the promise of stock options and plumper salaries at online art and auction sites.

Christie's is not alone in seeing departures from its ranks because of the Internet, however. Last year, the entire collectibles department of Sotheby's in London offered itself en masse to eBay. Politely rebuffed by the Internet giant, they wound up at I-collector, a London-based auction Website.

To fill the gaping void left by Brooks's departure, the Sotheby's board has appointed Bill Ruprecht, a former rug expert who has nominally run the firm's North and South American operations since 1994 -- the year Brooks assumed control of the company's operations worldwide. Some question whether he is up to the task. "Bill's an extremely nice guy," observes one Sotheby's veteran. "But he's basically incapable of making a decision. He deferred to Dede in everything."

The problem, ex-Sotheby's staff members explain, is that Brooks was so allergic to disagreement that she purposefully stocked Sotheby's senior management with malleable executives. One former department head agrees: "She's not a good delegator."

But even if Sotheby's straightens out its affairs, an even greater threat lurks in the background. The auction houses may now be considered valuable pawns in the global luxury-goods wars currently raging. Since the recent debacle, the most ardent suitor for Taubman's controlling stake in Sotheby's is said to be Bernard Arnault, the relentlessly acquisitive Paris-based chairman of LVMH, the world's leading luxury-goods conglomerate, who last year snapped up Phillips, the London-based auction house, for $120 million. In an urgent reprise of talks the two men secretly held last fall before the current auction-house scandal, Sotheby's majority shareholder and the LVMH emperor are said to be in the midst of negotiating a deal for Arnault to acquire Taubman's shares.