[Y_Y]

Maybe I should have said so explicitly, but in that case the seller would have to pay someone else, e.g. a common fund for promotion of the arts, or general taxation, or to the other bidders in portion to their bids to compensate them for not having any way to access the work.

Are you arguing that the idea is impossible in principle? The details will depend on what sort of incentives you want to end up with, but I can't see yet that there isn't some reasonable solution.

[eru]

You can probably come up with some messy compromise. But I'm not sure it's really much better than the existing system which already comes with fair-use constraints.

Or you could eg charge people a certain tax as a proportion of their self-declared value of the copyrighted material. (With the provision that they need to sell the rights to that material at the self-declared value to any comer or something like that.)