Martha Rosler's "Meta-Monumental Garage Sale," at MoMA Workers arranging items for a garage sale in the Museum of Modern Art's atrium, starting on Saturday. Beginning on Saturday, the Museum of Modern Art will hold a garage sale in its atrium. It will not be a "garage sale" - a piece of performance art in which a garage sale is enacted, or an exhibition using conceptual instruments of value to interrogate Marx's theory of commodity fetishism. It will be a place where you can buy a pair of secondhand snow skis or a functional toilet tank or a Barack Obama commemorative plate ($23) or an unused SpongeBob SquarePants alarm clock ($18). Or, if the price is right, you might even leave with a good set of Noritake china once owned by the mother of Martha Rosler, the creator and proprietor of the garage sale, who was unboxing the pieces on Monday afternoon and noted that they were not just for show. "No, no, I hope somebody buys them," she said, adding: "Jewish women always have four sets of dishes. I've got way too many. Of course, because the dishes and some 14,000 other things Ms. Rosler has amassed over the last year will be sold in the heart of one of the most powerful art institutions in the world, they can never be just garage sale items. And the sale cannot avoid being a performance, a Conceptual installation, an institutional critique and a loaded metaphor in a place filled with hundreds of millions of dollars" worth of objects that have, at least theoretically, departed the commercial realm for good. But Ms. Rosler - an artist whose work is often about the personal made political (and vice versa), and who has been holding art world garage sales like this for almost 40 years - said the only way to make the events interesting as art has been for them to be as much as possible like every other garage sale in America. "It's not symbolic activity," she said. It's real activity. Like most things, it has symbolic dimensions. What it is is a sale that will cover most of the roomy atrium - home in past years to works by artists like Monet, Barnett Newman and Jennifer Bartlett - with a mishmash of previously owned merchandise, some of it Ms. Rosler's, and the rest donated by museum employees, fellow artists and the public. With the exception of Thanksgiving Day and Tuesdays, when the museum is closed, it will go from noon to 5 p.m. daily (noon to 7:30 p.m. on Fridays), and 200 people at a time will be allowed into the sale area. Together with the museum's admission - $25 for adults - the prices might seem a little steep, but, well, it's New York. And Ms. Rosler, who priced most of the things herself, said it was also a practical matter: she was afraid that if prices were too low, things would sell too quickly, and she'd be left with a garage sale not worth stopping for. "I don't want people to be disappointed," she said. I'm serious. The proceeds go to charity. Her fascination with garage sales - as portraits, through possessions, of the people who hold them; as economic end runs engineered mostly by women; as suburban sacrament and social gathering - goes back to seeing them for the first time after moving to California in the 1970s. "I grew up in Crown Heights, and nobody would have ever thought of putting their things in front of their houses to sell," said Ms. Rosler, 69. Your neighbors would have thought you were crazy. It would have been deeply embarrassing. Stoop sales, now common in New York, are what she calls a "back-formation." She has put on the sales around the world, collecting things in each locale and sometimes selling profoundly personal things, like her son's baby shoes and used diaphragms. (Showing a photograph of merchandise recently, she said: "This is from Barcelona. This is from Vienna. This is my nightgown.") Ms. Rosler had decided it was about time to pull down the garage door for good when Sabine Breitwieser, MoMA's chief curator of media and performance art, approached her with an offer she could not refuse.