Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by HenryBemis 1918 days ago
> The most expensive autograph ever sold as of the writing of this essay is John Lennon’s signature on a copy of Double Fantasy that he signed the day he died. It fetched $900,000 at auction in 2010.

People imho buy the "uniqueness" of an item. This is why a poster of "the Kiss" by Klimt costs $10 and the original costs a $gazillion. The article mentions an autograph of Lennon. Not just any autograph, but one on the day he died. That means "no more after that". Maybe one will resurface, but

A friend who is a painter was telling me that one of the reasons painters become famous after death is because they don't dilute the value of their works by creating more. Imagine they paint one bridge, and it is great! Someone buys it for $10k. Then they go ahead and paint 50 more bridges. Now they will sell for 2k. So the $10k-buyer just got screwed. And we don't know if one day thay paint 50 more bridges, or that was it (dilution ends).

Now, she could be a bit bitter because she wasn't selling as high as she would wish, but she does make a good point.

1 comments

Uniqueness is only one part of the equation though. Hand made + beautiful + unique = amazing. Ugly pixelated jpeg generated by 300 lines of python + uniqueness = ???

It's kinda like playing all the notes from a Mozart piece in a random order, you could argue all the ingredients are there, but it won't be a masterpiece.

People are delusional, they want all the fame and rewards while putting less and less effort in their craft, if we can even call that a craft anymore, I mean, look at that shit: https://opensea.io/collection/the-anime-girls