A first printing of the U.S. Constitution sold for $43.2 million Thursday night at a Sotheby’s auction, setting a record for a historic document.Sotheby’s didn’t disclose a winner of the auction... The artifact carried a presale estimate of $15 million to $20 million and belonged to collector Dorothy Goldman. Her late husband, S. Howard Goldman, had purchased it for $165,000 in 1988.
Details at Bloomberg; photo credit Sotheby's.
US Constitution sold to someone with too much money. Sounds like a metaphor for our government right now?
ReplyDeleteOf course following you as long as I have I suspect that might have been in mind.
This morning I've already blocked a number of comments from readers using this event to foment partisan bickering. I'd rather the post just be res ipsa loquitur.
DeleteI share your disdain for Donald Trump, evident in your posts and comments. But, using this as one example, were your remarks simply "fomenting partisan bickering?" It's a tough call, but it's your blog and you can do anything you want. What you can't do, IMO, is legitimately claim you are not being arbitrary when you screen-out something like my Santa Clara comment. We all have an inner schoolmarm...and some other bad innards. That said, I will acknowledge the comment was evoked, more than literally on point. Perhaps too much a non-sequitur. Bickering for the sake of bickering? No.
Delete@Crowboy - I don't remember what your "Santa Clara comment" was about, but I hope I haven't made any claims of not being arbitrary. I have a bunch of opinions, beliefs, attitudes etc that are undoubtedly reflected both in the content of my posts and which material I allow in or filter out of the reader commentaries.
DeleteI have repeatedly posted on TYWKIWDBI some analysis of my political leanings, and the last time I did so you indicated that yours were almost exactly the same -
https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2020/06/revising-tywkiwdbi-once-again.html
I have to be arbitrary. If I let all comments come through, the comment threads would run the risk of degenerating into interpersonal attacks culminating in the evocation of Hitler comparisons as described by Godwin's Law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
My "Santa Clara" comment was a reference to a Supreme Court decision giving corporations the rights of "persons." (With Wikipedia link.) I said the Constitution was already "bought and sold." Anyway, I was annoyed. I'm fine now. I love this blog. Yes, I've been known to invoke Hitler...
DeleteAnd just to clarify/repeat/emphasize, when I block a comment, sometimes it's not because of the content of the comment, but because of my anticipation of what reactionary comments it might stimulate.
DeletePersonally, I value our constitution at a much higher value than $43 million.
ReplyDeleteWell, it's one of 13 remaining originals, so... how about $559 million?
DeleteIt's really interesting how people fetishize (sp?) printed materials (the First Folio of Shakespeare also comes to mind), isn't it? It's not like, say, a Van Gogh original where you can see the brushwork and get a sense of a special human being at work, or a manuscript by, say, Jefferson. The printing is the work of someone who's probably fairly unknown, and there's a distance from the people who created the words/sentences, etc.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if this particular copy has a well-known provenance? (Like, was it Person A's personal copy?)
But the printed work thing: we have lots and lots of copies, so there's nothing seemingly valuable about this one specific copy. But, at the same time, there's obviously people who value it greatly.
(If someone wants to buy me a First Folio, that would be fine with me... so that's my fetish, I suppose.)
A pretty good explanation of the NFT market, actually.
ReplyDelete