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Shiny Thing$ #237: Around the Industry
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Memorial Day weekend is the first real chance of the year disappear for a few days, and reset your sense of time a bit - so we’re not going to go too deep into the think pieces for this issue of Shiny Thing$… But while most people are checking out, the collectibles market just keeps accelerating - prices that would’ve sounded absurd even twelve months ago now getting nodded through without hesitation.
We wanted to end the weekend and start the holiday with a walk through some of the madness over the last few weeks that should get some attention as records have been falling in nearly every collectible category…
🖼️ Christie’s sells $1.1B of art in one night
Constantin Brancusi 1913 sculpture “Danaïde" sold for $107.6M last week via Christie’s “Masterpieces: The Private Collection of S.I. Newhouse” auction.
This past Monday night, Christie's sold more than $630 million in art in just 40 minutes, setting records for Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Constantin Brâncuși before adding another $490 million later in the evening. Brâncuși’s Danaïde shattered its estimate almost immediately, selling for $107.6 million with fees and eclipsing the artist’s prior $71.2 million record. A rare large-scale Pollock drip painting climbed to $181.2 million, becoming the night’s top lot, while three works from former MoMA president Agnes Gund helped push Rothko to a new $98.4 million high.
⌚ The highest grossing watch auction, ever
The star of the auction: the Patek Philippe Ref. 2523 “South America” world-time, which sold for $10M at Phillips last week.
Last week, Phillips Auction house set a new benchmark for the watch market after its Geneva Watch Auction XXIII brought in a record $96.3 million - the highest-grossing watch auction ever held. Across the two-day sale, 43 world records fell as collectors battled for some of the rarest timepieces on the market. Leading the auction was a Patek Philippe Ref. 2523 “South America” world timer, which sold for a record $10.2 million, followed by an F.P. Journe Chronomètre à Résonance “Souscription No. 18” at roughly $6.3 million and an Akrivia AK-06 that set a new mark at $3.9 million. This result came at the same time Sotheby’s Hong Kong was breaking the world record for the highly sought after Cartier Crash, with a 1 of 3 London-stamped 1987 example selling for $2M and setting a new (insane) world record.
🍷 Back to back new records for Bordeaux
Two magnums of Chateau Lafite 1870 that smashed their estimates at Sotheby’s, selling for around the average price of a home in Iowa.
In late April, a somewhat under the radar sale that could have far reaching implications went down at Sotheby’s. In their New York wine auction, two magnums of the legendary 1870 Glamis Castle Château Lafite Rothschild shattered records after a fierce bidding war between phone and online buyers. The 156-year-old bottles ultimately sold for $200,000 (nearly 7x their estimate) marking one of the most insane and surprising wine sales of the season.
🪐 Star Wars “Luke Skywalker” card doubles estimates
An ungraded copy of the 1977 Star Wars Series 1 Luke Skywalker trading card - a PSA 10 graded example of which nearly 3X’d its previous world record, set less than year ago.
Heritage Auctions brought in $3.6 million during its Star Wars Day sale earlier this month, highlighted by a record-breaking 1977 Topps Star Wars Series 1 “Luke Skywalker” PSA Gem Mint 10 rookie card that sold for $687,500. The result more than doubled the card’s prior $268,400 record set in 2025, establishing a new high-water mark for the category.
🦕 A Tokenized Dinosaur raised $15M
Jurassic Finance, a new platform for tokenizing dinosaurs, raised $15M in 2 weeks to purchase a Triceratops.
A newly launched RWA fund called Jurassic Finance is attempting to bring museum-quality dinosaur fossils onchain with 24/7 tokenized liquidity - and the market response has been immediate. The group set out to raise $200,000 to acquire a Triceratops skull, but finished May with more than $15 million from over 900 crypto-native buyers hoping to trade the dinosaur-backed token once launched. It marked one of the most aggressively oversubscribed crypto fundraising efforts since ConstitutionDAO in 2021.
🚨 RECORD WATCH: A new Mario Bros. Record?
Heritage Auction’s 9.6 early print Mario Bros. video game, still sealed, is the first game since Rally’s $2M Mario sale to put the high-end sealed game market to the test.
A few years ago, we set the record for the world’s most expensive video game with the $2 million sale of a sealed 9.8 early hangtab 1985 Super Mario Bros. After nearly two years of cooling prices, a new contender has emerged at Heritage Auctions: a PSA 9.6 A++ sealed Gloss Sticker second-production-copy Mario currently sitting at $562,000 with 20 days remaining. A rare enough example that the market is watching closely to see whether it can make a serious run at the $2 million benchmark.
And finally… a sign of the times?
To top off a few weeks of pure craziness in and around the collectibles space, a Topps Disneyland card containing a photo of a churro from a Disney concession stand sold for $560. Although, it was a 1-of-10…
Enjoy the holiday, and we’ll see you next week…