Individual collectors looking for a piece of American civil rights history will have to look elsewhere. The Sotheby’s auction of Dr. Martin Luther King’s archives (see below), which had been set to take place tomorrow, has been called off. The remarkable collection has been purchased and given to King’s own alma mater, Morehouse College in […]

At a time when the realm of antiquities is in need of some good news… Aphrodite finally regains her head after at least fifty years.
About three months ago, a headless marble figure of Aphrodite was consigned to Sotheby’s Antiquities sale by Mrs. Lawrence Copley Thaw Sr. of New York City. The figure, which is […]

Move over, Picasso.
The New York Times reported this morning that Gustave Klimt’s 1907 portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, wife of a Jewish sugar industrialist, Viennese art circle hostess extraordinaire and possible lover of Klimt, has sold privately for $135 million, becoming the highest price ever paid for a painting. The record was previously held by […]

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/06/09/america/web.0609king.php
An institution needs to step up.
On June 30th, Sotheby’s will auction the archives of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The trove contains more than 10,000 documents—7,000 of which are in King’s own hand. Some of the most noteworthy: a manuscript of his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, an annotated copy of “Letter […]

Vegas, baby. I just spent the last two days there as a guest of eBay at their 4th annual Collectibles Industry Summit, where the company brought together a cabal of 40 top folks in the collecting world—experts and journos in areas covering a wide swath of items that regularly trade on the site: coins, stamps, […]