Premiere Props, known in this art market as a company that holds a lot of low end auctions with great frequency, actually sold a piece this weekend for $344,000 (including fees) to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) in their Hollywood Extravaganza XVII sale.  The piece was a model of the Aries 1B Trans-Lunar Space Shuttle from Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey.  An interesting development for a number of reasons…  1) Premiere Props usually does not sell high end (six figure) material, 2) AMPAS has already gone public about being the buyer, and 3) who were the underbidders? [Read more…]