In 2022, Christie’s auction house made a WHOPPING $8.2 BILLION! 😅 Here are a few ways Christie’s was able to achieve that ridiculous amount of money!

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Guess how much money Christie’s made in 2022? You got your number? Err!

Christie’s auction house, in total for 2022, made $8.4 billion. You might be asking yourself, how did they get to the $8.4 billion? I will tell you.

So I’m about to break things down a little bit with just a bunch of facts and figures, so get ready, it’s really interesting.

First, I have to talk about the Paul G. Allen collection. The entire collection was slated to bring in about a billion dollars. It actually brought in $1.6 billion.

There were also two huge artworks that were sold. The first one is Andy Warhol’s “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn,” and that sold for a record-breaking $195 million.

The other artwork that was sold that made a huge splash was Man Ray’s “Violin D’Ingres” and that photo sold for $12.4 million.

A group of 168 ancient geoglyphs dating between 100 BCE and 300 BCE were just uncovered in Peru’s Nazca Desert! Among the images are depictions of humans, camelids, snakes, birds, and this 33-foot kitty! 😻

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What is cuter than a little kitty? How about an ancient kitty that’s about 33 feet in diameter? It’s huge!

A couple weeks ago, a group of 168 Nazca geoglyphs were identified in Peru’s Nazca Desert.

This particular group of geoglyphs that was just found date between 100 BCE and 300 BCE and included depictions of humans, camelids, birds, orcas, felines, and snakes.

These geoglyphs were created by removing black stones from the Earth’s surface to expose the white sand beneath. So it was this harsh, kind of dark and light contrast of sorts.

This recent finding adds to the nearly 190 previously identified geoglyphs that were found in this area in Peru between 2004 and 2018.

Scholars have posited a lot of different purposes to these geoglyphs, like whether they be to depict deities or served as a form of irrigation and they just happen to be really pretty as well, or that they’re actually a calendar with astrological alignments.

In October 2022, the remains of a 5,000-year-old bog body was found!

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In October, a new bog body was found!

Archaeologists on a dig in Egedal in Denmark found the legs, pelvis, and jaw of a person who lived 5,000 years ago. Bog bodies are not anything new in the history field.

In case you aren’t familiar with what the hell a bog body is, it’s a human cadaver that has been mummified in a peat bog, and then it just looks like the person’s just asleep.

The fact that this body was not intact, though, it was just a skeleton and fragments of the skeleton is really interesting.

I wonder what happened and what was different and what made that actually happen versus having the body be perfectly preserved.

So, what’s interesting also about the skeleton is that there were no signs of violence. So no knife marks, wounds, breaks, anything like that in the bones that they found.

Because of this, it’s believed that this skeleton was also part of ritual human sacrifice.

The Netherlands successfully returned over 200 pre-columbian and pre-Hispanic items to Mexico! 🥳

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Our something borrowed/stolen this week, is yet another successful case of repatriation.

This time, though, we’re talking about the Netherlands and Mexico. So this past week, the Netherlands returned 223 pre-Hispanic and pre-Columbian artifacts to Mexico.

The items that were returned from the Netherlands span the time periods of the Mesoamerican Pre-classic period all the way to the Post-classic period. So that’s a big f***in’ time span!

And these items are also from a wide range of areas in Mexico and a wide range of cultures. The return of these items is part of a larger issue where pre-Hispanic and pre-Columbian artifacts are being illicitly trafficked around the world.

Three of Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s legal heirs are suing a Japanese holding company, Sampo Holdings.

Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was a German-Jewish banker who was forced to sell his amazing art collection (including Picasso, Monet, and Vincent van Gogh’s painting “Sunflowers”) to avoid persecution by the Nazis.

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Three legal heirs of a man by the name of Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, are suing a Japanese holding company.

Apparently, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, who was a German-Jewish banker, was forced to sell his art collection to avoid persecution by the Nazis.

Some of the artworks that were in his collection included pieces by Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, and Auguste Renoir, and these were sold sometime within the mid-1930s.

Another piece that was part of his collection, though, which is part of this whole legislative lawsuit sort of thing, was Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 painting “Sunflowers.”

So Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s heirs filed this lawsuit December 13th, and they alleged that Sampo Holdings ignored and was “recklessly indifferent” toward the painting’s provenance when it was sold in the late 1980s at public auction.

In return, though, Sampo Holdings, of course, is denying any and all allegations that are being brought forth.