Welcome to Cultural Assets Insider for April 15th, 2022 – FREE Edition.
Each week we give you the scoop on undervalued, mispriced and hidden gems in Alternative Investing.
Cultural Assets performance in 2022
When we last checked in on cultural assets, they were down on the year but still positive overall. In fact, we’d just seen a slight uptick and thought that maybe, just maybe, we’d found a bottom.
Turns out not.
It’s been a steady ride down the last two months with no real signs of slowing down, unfortunately.
Last Week in Cultural Assets
Fractional secondary markets
Art has been the only bright spot lately while everything else, more or less, has suffered.
There are a LOT of assets trading on fractional marketplaces for a…fraction…of their valuations.
Auctions
Last week, someone paid $504k for five bits of the first lunar sample taken during the Apollo 11 mission to the moon.
Collected by first-man-on-the-moon Neil Armstrong, the samples are each only around 10mm in diameter, and the whole thing is basically a bit of dust.
But here’s the wild bit.
You know when you empty out your vacuum bag, and there’s a bit of lint and stuff left over, and it’s impossible to get out of the bag, and it’s just sort of always there?
That’s what these samples are.
Neil’s bag actually held around 1kg of moon dust. When it got back to earth, the bag was emptied out, and NASA did their science stuff to the contents.
The storage bag got thrown out / lost, and it wound up in a private collection. Eventually, someone noticed there was a bit of dust inside the bag, so they sent it to NASA for verification and removal.
This item is that dust. Imagine how much the full 1kg would be worth…
Speaking of wild, you can always count on RRAuctions to bring the heat.
Today I learned that Lee Harvey Oswald (the guy who *probably* killed JFK) had a life insurance policy. After Jack Ruby killed Oswald, Lee’s mum Marguerite filed an insurance claim for his death.
It took a while, but she was paid out $863.
A few days ago, someone paid $63k for the claim form.
Also available in the auction:
- A Bernie Madoff signed stock certificate ($7,500)
- An invitation to Queen Victoria’s Coronation ($3,452)
Looping back to space stuff quickly, RR also has a Space Exploration event going on right now, but nothing as wild as anything above.
This is sort of cute, though.
This Week in Cultural Assets
Fractional IPOs
One fractional IPOs this week from Rally, and it’s a controversial one.
Rally has partnered (I think, it’s hard to tell) with entrepreneur/social media guy/salesman Gary Vee to sell one of his doodles.
🎙🎙🎙🎙🎙🎙
— Rally (@OnRallyRd) April 10, 2022
The Best Money I Ever Spent
𝓅𝓇𝑒𝓈𝑒𝓃𝓉𝑒𝒹 𝒷𝓎 Rally
OUT NOW: Ep 0001: “Kryptonite to the Cynical” w/ @garyvee
On iPhone: https://t.co/iDhz6UP7pJ
On Spotify: https://t.co/AnPvZDKJW2 pic.twitter.com/rFeWvgoihH
What are these doodles?
Gary created an NFT project called Veefriends, which gives you access to his convention and some other stuff. They’ve done pretty well, actually, and the floor price for the collection is around 15 ETH ($45k or so).
The basis for the NFTs was a bunch of drawings Gary did. They’re sharpie-on-A4 pictures of animals with cute names. The doodle in question is “Sharing Squirrel,” pictured above.
The only real comps we have for these is a set of five that was sold at Christie’s in October 2021.
I’m not sure which is the best comp (maybe the Gorilla??), but they’re all pretty much in line with the market cap Rally’s listed the Squirrel at.
Since we don’t have any other comps, the best we can do is to look at how the NFT collection has done.
It’s worth noting that the seller (I assume it’s Gary, but I could be wrong) is keeping 25% equity in the doodle. Can’t help but wonder if Fox is going to come after Gary for copyright infringement at some point.
“You will also notice Mr. Myers’ name and copyright notice on the original drawings of the other members of the Itchy & Scratchy family: Brown-nose Bear, Disgruntled Goat, Flatulent Fox, Rich Uncle Skeleton and Dinner Dog.” pic.twitter.com/Zh4fw00F9q
— SimpsonsQOTD (@SimpsonsQOTD) October 11, 2018
GARY VEE: ORIGINAL VEEFRIENDS SKETCH (SHARING SQUIRREL)
- Market Cap: $275k
- Inferred Value: $300k
- Drop Details: 4/15/22 on Rally
- Our view: [INSIDERS ONLY]
Auctions
Potters wins the award for Weirdest Auction of the week with their Circus oddities event. It’s mostly photos of performers, and I’m not going to post any of these here, because it feels mean (they’re all pretty unfortunate / exploited people).
The posters are quite cool (above), and the art is special if you’re into that sort of thing, I guess?
On a slightly less-nightmarish note, Julien’s is auctioning off Kurt Cobain’s guitar from the famous “Smells like Teen Spirit” music video. It’s expected to fetch up to $1m.
Sticking with angry rockers… On the off-chance your self-esteem is just a little too high these days, you can buy one of these rock legends flipping you the bird.
I’m out of space and time this week, but check out Gotta Have Rock ‘n Roll’s auction coming up later this month as well.
There’s soooo much good stuff in there, but this is probably my favourite.
Lastly, Our Podcast
Horacio spoke with Laura Ten Eyck, an antiquarian map dealer, vice president of the New York Map Society, and a Gallery Director at the Argosy Bookstore. She talks about the most famous maps of the world, what makes them valuable, and the 1796 Plan for New York City that will be fractionalized on Rally Road in the near future.
