Melania’s latest NFT sale was hit by a crypto crash
Meanwhile... RBG’s library just sold at auction for $2.4 million
Hi, I’m Hunter and I curate the Yello newsletter, Twitter, and Instagram. Subscribe to get the latest in visual politics delivered to your inbox:
Hello, in this week’s issue we’ll look at…
Melania’s latest NFT sale was hit by a crypto crash
Meanwhile… RBG’s library just sold at auction for $2.4 million
The artist behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs didn’t know they blew up
The Smithsonian now has a return policy for unethically sourced objects
Melania’s latest NFT sale was hit by a crypto crash
Our crypto bro former first lady’s latest NFT sale came in under its estimated minimum asking price last week after the cryptocurrency she used tumbled in value.
Former first lady Melania Trump’s Head of State Collection came with the Herve Pierre hat she wore to French President Emmanuel Macron’s state visit in 2018, a watercolor portrait of her in the hat by Marc-Antoine Coulon, and an animated video NFT of the watercolor.
Trump’s office said the sale would begin with a minimum bid of the equivalent of $250,000 in the cryptocurrency Solana, but just five bids were made, and the final bid clocked in at about $170,000, according to the Washington Post. Crypto prices crashed last week, including Solana, which fell more than 40%. The price of the collection has since increased about $30,000 this week as Solana recovered.
The soft sale shows the short-term risks of crypto and suggests the market for six-figure NFTs of previously worn items from Trump’s White House wardrobe is not particularly large.
Robin Givhan, the Post’s Pulitzer-winning critic-at-large, was withering, writing that while Trump had every right to sell the hat, in auctioning it, the ex-FLOTUS transformed it from history into a commodity.
“[I]t was historic because it was worn as part of her wardrobe for the administration’s first state dinner,” Givhan wrote. “Taxpayer dollars didn’t purchase it, but it was part of a formal ceremony during which our country welcomed another and she was our representative. And then it was put up for auction like a piece of celebrity flotsam.”
I asked Coulon, the artist, if any new NFTs are forthcoming, and he told me in a DM he’s not allowed to say. 🤐
Meanwhile… RBG’s personal library just sold at auction for $2.4 million
An auction of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s personal library ended last week with more than 1,000 books and other items selling for a total of $2.4 million.
The eight-day Bonhams auction included textbooks from Ginsburg’s law school days, her first published book, and gifts signed by famous pals, like Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and Gloria Steinem’s “My Life on the Road.” RBG’s copy of “Women” is signed “with great admiration” by Annie Leibovitz (the book includes a shot of Ginsburg with former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor taken by Leibovitz on pages 226 and 227).
The sale generated about 3,800 times more than the presale estimate, according to Artnet News, with the priciest item being Ginsburg’s annotated copy of the 1957-58 Harvard Law Review, which sold for $100,312.
RBG’s library also included a 1937 Simon & Schuster Bible, sheet music signed by Diane Warren for “I’ll Fight” from the Academy Award-nominated motion picture RBG, and books by colleagues like Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer.
“A person's library can give us a sense of who the individual is and how she came to be,” Bonhams book department head Catherine Williamson said in a statement. “The books Justice Ginsburg chose to keep on her own bookshelf showcase the rich inner and intellectual life of one of the most influential women in recent American history.”
The artist behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs didn’t know they blew up
Bored Ape Yacht Club is a collection of 10,000 bored ape NFTs that launched last spring and have since generated more than $1 billion. Justin Bieber has one. I don’t get it either.
The lead artist behind the original collection, 27-year-old Seneca, didn’t know how big they’d become initially, and she told Rolling Stone she only found out they blew up months later when she saw Warriors star Steph Curry using an avatar on Twitter she designed.
“Not a ton of people know that I did these drawings, which is terrible for an artist,” she said.
Seneca was connected with the Bored Ape Yacht Club creators through her creative agent because they needed artists to make images of punk apes that expressed “existential boredom,” as one co-founder put it. Seneca worked as lead artist on a team, and while she didn’t discuss specifics of her compensation, she said it “was definitely not ideal” and warned aspiring creators to ask for royalties and have smart contracts when creating NFTs. The minimum cost of entry for a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT right now is about $224,000, according to CNET.
A Rhode Island School of Design graduate who was born in the U.S. and raised in Shanghai, Seneca sells her own NFTs now. Her debut collection of four trippy bug-eyed portraits sold on the NFT platform OpenSea in December, and she recently tweeted that more work will be released in March. Her “Delirium” (above) was shown at Art Basel 2021.
She also has Bored Ape Yacht Club’s primitive primate ancestors: her early concept sketches of the project’s characters. I wonder how much those would go for?
The Smithsonian now has a return policy for unethically sourced objects
The Smithsonian is set to release a new restitution policy for the institution’s 19 museums on returning items determined to be unethically sourced.
The policy, written over six months by an Ethical Returns Working Group, will be released in March, according to Artnet News. Already, the National Museum of African Art removed 10 Benin bronzes that had been determined to have been taken by British soldiers in a raid in 1897.
A conversation about restitution is happening worldwide. The Louvre launched a three-year restitution project last week and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis recently called on the U.K. to return Parthenon marbles. As the largest museum and research complex in the world, the Smithsonian Institution’s new policies will set a visible example for the rest of the industry.
And finally…
Respect.
You probably heard that the green M&M got new shoes, but did you also hear they got a new font? I wrote about how M&M’s pitched its rebrand as progressive and triggered the cons in last week’s newsletter. You can read it here. — Hunter
Yello is better with friends. Share this post:
Subscribe to Yello: