Above the Mantel 006

Good morning, Collectors, 

Kudos to all of the enterprising businesses that had Steamboat Willie products ready to go the second the earliest designs of Mickey Mouse entered the public domain on January 1st. Willie now even has his first non-Disney trading cards, like this one from GAS, or this one from Leaf. The best we’ve seen so far is this 1/1 Steamboat Willie / Tiger Woods art card from Kids At Heart Cards. Just perfect. 

Hey, by the way! If you’re digging this newsletter and want to make sure it doesn’t go to spam, you can whitelist us in Gmail by moving the email from the Promotions tab to your main inbox. And if you have friends who would enjoy reading interesting stories about collectibles each week, please share our sign-up link: https://mantel.beehiiv.com/subscribe. 

Now let’s get into it. 

Collector’s Item

All eyes in the art world are on Sotheby's, but not because of a live auction. This week the company is in the news as it fights a lawsuit filed against it by Russian Oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev, who claims the famed auction house conspired with an art dealer to inflate prices of fine art they sold him. 

Rybolovlev, a fertilizer mogul worth $6.4B according to Forbes, spent more than $2B to amass his art collection, which at one time included “Salvator Mundi,” a painting of Jesus Christ thought to be by Leonardo da Vinci. But he claims he was overcharged by as much as $1B for the pieces, and blames Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier and Sotheby's for knowingly inflating the tab. 

The scheme was simple, according to the lawsuit: Bouvier would buy pieces Rybolovlev asked him to source, often from Sotheby’s, before jacking up the price and reselling them to his client. That da Vinci “Salvator Mundi” we mentioned? Bouvier, on the hunt for his client, bought the painting himself for $83M and then resold it to Rybolovlev the very next day for $127.5M, a cool $44.5M in profit (plus the 2% commission check… Not a bad day’s work!).

Rybolovlev more than made his money back on the da Vinci, however. In 2017 he flipped it at auction for $450.3M, reportedly to a buyer representing Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.

The dispatches from court have been fascinating, giving us a rare peek behind the velvet curtain into the notoriously secretive world of fine art dealing. Sotheby’s, meanwhile, would much rather people focus on their upcoming auctions, like the January 20th “America's Finest Bourbon and Rye Through the Decades” sale, which includes a 12-bottle lot of Pappy Van Winkle’s 20 Year Old Family Reserve, expected to fetch as much as $120K. 

Penny Thoughts

• Michael Jordan game-worn items, like his jerseys and sneakers, can sell for millions of dollars at auction, so it’s no surprise his game-driven cars sell for a premium too. Earlier this week a lucky bidder won MJ’s 1991 BMW 850i for $108,723 from auction site Bring a Trailer (notice the $23 in the bid). The car even comes with documentation signed by His Airness himself. The hammer price was 3-4x what most 1991 850i’s go for today, proving that 20 years after retirement, we all still want to Be Like Mike. 

• A topic we (ahem) brooch often in these pages is thrift store finds that turn out to be super valuable. So news this week that a jewelry collector in Florida discovered that a brooch she bought in the 1980s for $25 is actually a rare Victorian example worth upwards of $19,000 caught our eye. How did the collector realize her favorite costume jewelry was actually a valuable piece of history? From watching Antiques Roadshow, of course, making this the third brooch from the same Victorian-era designer to be uncovered on the show. 

Mantel Update

This week the landing page for Mantel went live, with a sign-up link to be added to our waitlist for early access to the site. We’re barreling towards an official launch in just a few weeks and would love to get all of our Above the Mantel readers registered and active before our big day. So please check out the page (www.onMantel.com), sign up, and share the link with friends. And we’ll make sure all of our early supporters get a special Day One badge when we go live.