Ultra-Rare Honus Wagner & The Ethics of NFT Art

A wild backstory leads to a massive estimate, and using NFTs for restitution

Cultured is a newsletter by Otis that gets readers up to speed on the most interesting things going on at the intersection of finance, art, collectibles, NFTs, and more.

Love Cultured? Spread the word and share this newsletter with a friend!

---

🗞 STORIES OF THE DAY

Another Honus Wagner card is going up for auction. This one has a wild backstory.

• The rare “All-Star Café Wagner” is going up for auction for the first time in almost a decade. Its backstory will likely lead it to sell for somewhere in the seven-figure range.

• The card was loaned out by Charlie Sheen to the All-Star Café in New York. One of the chefs stole the card from the display case and sold it to a sports card dealer with a fake backstory. The FBI got involved and the card was returned.

• It’s going up for sale at an ideal time — the market for T206 Honus Wagner cards has never been hotter. Last August, one sold for a record $6.6 million, and a fragment sold last month for almost $500,000.

Our Take: A strong backstory coupled with a red-hot market may result in a record-breaking sale.

The price of a collectible is the result of a variety of factors, including rarity, the market for similar objects, and the history of that particular product. A strong backstory can inflate the price of a work significantly. Collectors are particularly fond of the “stolen object” narrative. Combine that hype with a market that will buy a piece of a similar card for $500,000 and you have ideal conditions for a new world record.

Hey there, good lookin’

---

A collective in the Congo turned a museum’s statue into an NFT. Is it legal?

• A Congolese statue depicting a Belgian officer killed in the early 20th century has been turned into an NFT by an artist collective in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which owns the statue, says they violated copyright laws.

• The work was originally created to harness the spirit of the officer, which posed a risk to the native Pende people. It was sold to the museum in the 1970s, and members of the Congolese artist collective were in discussions about receiving the work on loan.

• After the collective created the NFTs, the museum declined to loan out the work saying that minting the NFTs was “unacceptable and unprofessional.” The NFT creators say they’re protected by fair use, which lets them use an image if they change it enough.

Our Take: The blockchain has potential when it comes to regaining control of stolen and expropriated objects.

Museums have been under significant pressure in recent years to return works that were taken from native peoples under colonial regimes. However, few have actually returned those works. Some groups have found that creating NFTs of those works helps them regain some semblance of control over their heritage. As the Congolese collective wrote, NFTs have the potential to become “a radical new model of restitution.”

The Congolese statue (and NFT) of the Belgian officer.

---

✨ AROUND THE INTERNET

• The Associated Press canceled plans to sell a video of an overcrowded boat of migrants on its NFT marketplace, after getting skewered online for cashing in on the “plight of desperate migrants.”

• How do you identify NFT collections with potential? Here are a few tips.

• Want some unique drip on your Nikes? The brand just unleashed a new AF1 sneaker with…pearls.

• Tango, a live-streaming platform, has released its own digital trading card marketplace. The cards aren’t NFTs, but can be bought and sold in a similar way.

• In the latest edition of vending machines for things that just don’t need to be vended, New York got its first NFT ATM.

Maybe this will go the way of those kitschy Cupcake ATMs (remember those?)