An auction at which people bid with things other than money, e.g., books.

I read somewhere that Alvin Lucier encouraged people to perform/realize "I Am Sitting In A Room" with alternate texts than the one he uses on the canonical recording, viz:

I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of r-r-r-rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity nnnnnot so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to s-s-smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.

(Of course the stutter isn't so much part of the text as one of the irregularities his speech has.)  I think it would be moderately clever to do this with the following text, the first paragraph of Quine's "The Scope and Language of Science", thoughtfully provided on a handout by a colloquium speaker:

I am a physical object sitting in a physical world.  Some of the forces of this physical world impinge on my surface. Light rays strike my retinas; molecules bombard my eardrums and fingertips. I strike back, emanating concentric airwaves. These waves take the form of a torrent of discourse about tables, people, molecules, light rays, retinas, prime numbres, infinite classes, joy and sorrow, good and evil.

It's shorter, of course, but meh.