19 November 2021
The November 2021 Sotheby's Contemporary auction is the most important auction of the past two years. The lots are rare works by famous contemporary artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Yoshitomo Nara, and Alexander Calder. For the four-day Evening and Day Auctions Sotheby’s has made excellent auction results, including the high-priced Mark Rothko’s 89.3 million on the first day, and the next night Mexican female artist Frida Kahlo’s ‘Diego and I’ sells for $34.9 million.
On November 18th, the auction came to a close with two evening sales. Above all the highlights, the most distinctive story was focusing on the U.S. Constitution auction and the story will become the most meaningful tale in auction history.
Before the auction, I saw a man holding a sign in front of the Sotheby’s building with the words "We the people will buy the constitution." Even though he tried several times to greet people by holding up the sign most people just walked by him.
I decided to interview him, the man Jeff Graber told me that he came from a cryptocurrency group "ConstitutionDAO” (DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization), they used the “discord” app to text each other to spread the information as join forces. Within 72 hours, more than 7,600 people donated 41 million US dollars in virtual currency, Ethereum. People came to participate to donate money for the constitution auction because they believe the constitution should belong to the people. If they outbid the auction to receive the rare, first-edition copy of the U.S. Constitution at Sotheby’s, they will place it for the public to view freely. Let the constitution belong to the public, instead of a private hand.
This concept to gather the power of small people against the big capitalist is like the incident of Robinhood action with GameStop. The incident caused a sensation in the stock market not long ago ending with a huge penalty. Unfortunately, today’s crowdfunding of 41 million US dollars was lost to a private investor of 43 million US dollars (Billionaire outbid a group of crypto investors - Bloomberg). The constitutional battle ended for such a heroic effort but the priceless copy might eventually be locked into someone’s safety box.
Therefore, the trend of decentralization in the era of big data blockchain has shown its power.
By Lily Kostrzewa
