The art market wasn’t ready for revolution. A rare, first-edition copy of the U.S. Constitution sold for $43.2 million at Sotheby’s Thursday, but it appears the winner is a private collector rather than an online group of cryptocurrency investors. From a report: The group, called ConstitutionDAO, caused a stir in art and crypto circles this week by pooling more than $40 million to bid, but an anonymous phone bidder pledged even more and will take home one of the 13 surviving official copies of the Constitution.
Sotheby’s sale on Thursday transforms the governing document into the priciest six pages in auction history, surpassing Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates’s $30.8 million copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s scientific notebook known as the Codex Leicester. The Constitution also exceeded the $21.3 million paid for a copy of the 1297 Magna Carta by Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein in 2007. The winner remains anonymous, but the group pledging the second-highest price was ConstitutionDAO, an online organization that its founders say was formed as a lark last week and wound up pooling donations from 17,437 people to try to win the historic artifact. “What we tried to do was make the Constitution more accessible to the public,” said core organizer Anisha Sunkerneni of San Francisco. “Although we might have not completely accomplished doing just that, I think we’ve raised enough awareness to illustrate that a DAO is another option.”
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