The David Ortiz jersey buried in the new Yankee Stadium is up for auction on eBay. There are 198 bids and the price is at more than $69,000 (as of this writing), with the proceeds going to The Jimmy Fund. I'll be interested to see where it ends up. It's a fantastic story and this is a great piece of oddball memorabilia related to one of the great rivalries in sports.
As some of you may be aware, I know a thing or two about collectible comic books. Because of that knowledge, last month I was asked to write a large piece about collectible comics for a magazine from the UK called Rare Book Review. Well, apparently it's out now and to my surprise my little article is the cover story:
I'll have the article itself up on my comics site soon and I'll be sure to link to it when it goes live.
They were going for $20,000 not so long ago. £96,000 is a long way away from $20,000.
Check it out:
A screenprint of model Kate Moss by artist Banksy fetched three times its estimated price at an auction last night devoted solely to street art.
The work, a pastiche of Andy Warhol's iconic portrait of Marilyn Monroe, sold for £96,000 at Bonhams in London.
The Bristol-based artist's Laugh Now, a stencil image of a monkey wearing a sandwich board which was expected to sell for £150,000-£200,000, went under the hammer at £228,000.
Not to debate the merits of Mark Rothko (although I should admit he's a painter I don't particularly care for), but the idea that a piece of postwar art could approach the Old Master auction record* disturbs me. That any postwar painting could sell for more than any Rembrandt, Vermeer or Caravaggio causes me psychic pain**.
Here's the record breaker:
*Rubens' Massacre of the Innocents sold for £49.5million ($76.2 million) in 2002.
The painting:
**Obviously, there are more valuable Old Master paintings. Paintings like Girl With a Pearl Earring or The Syndics of the Clothmakers Guild or The Taking of Christ (just to choose three that I like at random) would sell for extraordinary sums. It's just that paintings of that caliber don't change hands very often so the auction record is much lower than it could be.
It's the freakin' General Lee and it's for sale:
eBay Motors: Dodge : Charger (item 250108256198 end time May-04-07 10:02:36 PDT)
Over 2 million with a couple of days to go. I wonder what the Final Value Fee will be on that one.
The upcoming Christies auction is good jumping off point. Some of the paintings available include works by people like:
Not a bad haul. Not thematic, of course, but still, that'd go pretty far in getting a small museum up and running.
"The bidding yesterday lasted less than four minutes. The rare Stradivarius violin went for a high — but not a record — price of $2.4 million."
The bidding started at $700,000 and moved to 2.4 mil in that short a time? That's a fucking spectator sport if I ever heard of one. Regular auctions are fun. An auction for an object as unique and treasured as a Stradivarius? That's plum crazy.
A Stradivarius, Not Top of the Line, Goes for $2.4 Million - New York Times
I don't have a collectible copy of Neuromancer, so this one would do nicely, I think…
I listed some random paintings on eBay