Hummingbird Draft Day

How many different ways can you buy and sell art?  Well you can buy directly from a dealer, you can fight with others at auction or you can play the Arader Galleries syndication distributed offering “game”. What that means is that you buy individual shares which entitle you to buy five lithographs (at a cost of $4,800) from John Gould’s famous hummingbird magnum opus.  Here’s the fun part.  It’s like a fantasy football draft, where your draft position determines the order of when you pick a player (or in this case hummingbird).  So if you have the number one pick (the draft order was chosen randomly), you choose first and then you choose first again in the next “round”. And the offering game ends when all the lithographs have been selected.  The great thing about this draft is that there are no bad picks (unlike those of you who may have chosen Peyton Manning as their QB like I did in my recent fantasy football draft, and we all know how that’s playing - or not playing - out).

Anyway back to live action.  We had a gathering of loyal Gould fans on Super Saturday (Sep 17) on the second floor of the 1016 Madison Avenue gallery.  The draft order was set via numbered ping pong balls and we were off to the races. You’d think with over 400+ picks the draft would take a while, but it moved swiftly along – a shade over two hours. Some people agonized over their choices, others trusted the advice of their chosen draft guides namely Captains Graham Arader, Caleb Kiffer, Lori Cohen and Alison Petretti. Thankfully, there were no fouls or unsportsmanlike behavior at least as far as we could see. It was good fun and people walked away satisfied with their picks.  Not a bad way to spend a Saturday.

Guest blogger:  Alex K