PECKED.

When Amy Cappellazzo, the international co-head of postwar and contemporary art at Christie's, secured a sale of selections from the Pierre Huber collection, one of the pieces about which she was most enthusiastic was "Flying Rats," by the French-Algerian artist Kader Attia. It consists of a hundred-and-fifty-square-foot cage, a couple of dozen figures of children molded from birdseed, and a hundred and fifty hungry pigeons. "It was at the Lyons Biennial in 2005, and everyone who saw it said it was the showstopper," Cappellazzo said recently, as she watched the work being set up on the auction house's twentieth floor. "It was the only one you walked away from changed, and that is what you want from an art experience--to be changed."

A row of synthetic wigs in disconcertingly small sizes were arrayed on the concrete floor, as were various shorts and T-shirts fit for five- or six-year-olds. A couple of Attia's assistants were working their way through a sack of birdseed with a coffee grinder, mixing the ground seed with water and flour to make a paste. "We're having a little issue with the consistency of the seed," Cappellazzo said. Another pair of assistants smeared birdseed paste onto child-shaped metal armatures. The finished figures--faceless, but wearing sneakers--looked like characters from a Comedy Central series aimed at macabre-minded teen-agers. The pigeons would be feasting upon the model children for only six days, rather than the two months of the Lyons Biennial, but Cappellazzo anticipated that the desired effect would nonetheless take place. "They are definitely going to look as if they'd been violently accosted," she said.

The work, which Cappellazzo described as "being about the innocence of childhood as something that is elusive and phantomlike," goes on sale this week, for a price estimated at between sixty thousand and eighty thousand dollars. The buyer receives neither cage nor birds nor birdseed children but a ...