The "auction" (for lack of a better word) is over. Look at what happened.

[MattyC]

Originally Posted by glchen

Right, seriously. If the card market ever crashed to pennies, no noncollector would have any sympathy. They would be thinking what were these idiots thinking spending thousands of dollars on pieces of cardboard. At least with art, it is studied in school, and shown in world class museums. Coins and stamps have a country's history. Even comic books can be made into movies that make hundreds of millions of dollars. Baseball movies are lucky to get close to $100 million during their entire run.

I respectfully couldn't disagree with this more. So comics are somehow inherently more valuable than cards because they can be made into terrible yet high grossing films? Coins and stamps have a country's history, and cards are part of sports history-- and sports are deeply woven into America's cultural fabric. Art is studied in school, but what makes a Basquiat worth millions and some other brilliant but unhyped artists never makes it big in the art world? There are politics and shadiness at play in the art collecting world, from authentic pieces that an estate doesn't want to dub legit, to the hype that certain influential players can give, which in turn blows up an artists' prices. Look at how attention from the Shafrazis and Gagosians of the art world can affect an artists' prices. And art is the zenith of subjectivity; in contrast a card's rarity, popularity, and the stature of the player depicted are pretty quantifiable, at least relative to justifying why one artist or art work is worth X and another worth Y.