If you think the world of collectibles is a placid, calm sort of place.
Think again.
Of course, there is plenty of scholarly discussion of old documents, debates over the design of stamps and the like.
But, it’s a world of passion.
And collecting means engaging with history.
Which is controversy, conflict, chaos - all the time throughout recorded time.
So, naturally that spills into the auction house.
Controversy comes in a number of common forms in collecting:
Ownership. Who found something or who looted it? What’s public property and what’s fair-game for sale? This is increasingly an issue as collectors try to navigate the legacy of imperialism.
Morality and taste. Is it right to profit from terrible tragedy? Should you sell artefacts from history’s worst murderers? An enormous and amorphous area.
Is it art? Some art is controversial in content and makes us question whether it is art or not, let alone worth a hefty price tag.
You’ll see all of these come up in our list of 10 controversial auctions.
John Lennon assassination signature
Mark David Chapman, Lennon's murderer after his arrest. Hours before he shot Lennon, he collected his autograph.
One of the most extraordinary items ever offered for sale is also one of the most controversial.
The story is well known: Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon on December 8, 1980. A former fan of the Beatle, Chapman approached his target five hours before the crime and asked him to sign a copy of Double Fantasy, Lennon’s record recorded with his wife, Yoko Ono.
A snap - Lennon was followed and photographed by fans and professional photographers throughout his life - captured the fateful moment.
In the chaotic moments after the murder, the album was dropped on the floor outside Lennon’s apartment block, the Dakota. Someone picked it up.
They subsequently gave it to the NY police, who used it in their case against Chapman, but it was returned to its finder who subsequently sold it.
It’s been sold at least once, and is listed online for sale now, but many would think twice before buying an item that contains the name of a musical hero and the forensically enhanced finger prints of his murderer.
The Buddha jewels
Jewellery possibly associated with the burial of the Buddha was sensationally withdrawn from sale this week. Image courtesy of Sotheby's.
As we write this is a current controversy. A dramatic intervention by the Indian Government has halted an auction of artefacts found around the probable burial site of the Buddha.
The so-called Buddha Jewels were originally excavated in the late 19th-century by a British colonial official. His find was assessed by the British authorities and much of it deposited in museums. A good deal - the possible physical remains of the Buddha - were given to the King of Siam.
When descendants of William Claxton Peppé tried to sell gems that the family had been allowed to keep in 2025 there was a huge fuss.
Finally, just as the sale was about to go ahead the Indian Government jumped in citing UN charters and international law and the sale was halted.
The gems raise all sorts of questions about ethics, ownership, religious rights, colonialism.
And, in time, we’ll find out what the law, probably in Hong Kong where the auction was taking place, decides.
Heidi Horten jewels
13 million Swiss francs worth of ruby, but how was it paid for?
Nazi loot.
It’s a cliched phrase now, but it became commonplace because the scale of Nazi evil was so enormous it defies description.
And it included enormous theft.
Sometimes these cases are very direct and straightforward.
Often they are complicated by different legal systems with different standards. So, in 2017 a painting that the auction house knew full well had been stolen by Nazis from a Jewish collector could be listed for sale, with the knowledge that it could probably never leave Austria, where it was legal to sell it.
The Horten jewellery collection sales were, charitably, a little bit more complex.
Heidi Horten had amassed the collection. But her family’s money was tainted. Her husband, Helmut, had built a retail empire largely with “Aryanised” property: businesses owned by Jews who were forced to sell them, often at very low prices.
Christie’s held a series of sales in 2023 that set a record as the most valuable ever single-owner jewellery collection at auction.
But after criticism, including of some very euphemistic publicity materials, they stopped selling the Horten estate, made donations to charities, and promised to reflect on their conduct.
Christie’s AI art sale
Roope Rainisto's The Swimming Hall was made using generative AI and large language model AI. But should it be sold at all?
Against the enormity of some of the crimes discussed in this article the future of art production may seem less morally questionable.
But, AI is raising big questions. And when Christie’s announced an AI art sale there was a huge outcry.
The sale went ahead. And did well, with a big audience among younger people.
But before it did 4,000 artists had signed a letter asking for it to be cancelled.
Rather than raise a philosophical question they called out AI companies for theft: “Your support of these models, and the people who use them, rewards and further incentivizes AI companies’ mass theft of human artists’ work. We ask that, if you have any respect for human artists, you cancel the auction.”
Hopi masks
A Hopi mask auctioned in Paris. The sale was disrupted by protests but went ahead. Some buyers gave the pieces back to their owners. Image from Eve Paris.
What’s legally permissible isn’t always morally right.
You know that, right?
That contradiction was too much for a charitable foundation that bought a collection of sacred Native American masks at auction.
They gave them back to their creators.
The American-based Annenberg Foundation said it had spent more than $0.5 million on masks and other artefacts that it subsequently gave to the Hopi Nation of Arizona and the San Carlos Apache.
The auction had gone ahead despite protests and appeals to UN rules on cultural heritage.
And the auction house had a defence: “Blocking such sales would have implications for the trade in indigenous art, and could potentially force French museums to hand back collections they had bought.”
And we couldn’t have that could we.
Such ownership disputes are already common and they are likely to get more common in future.
The Tsar’s jewellery
A Faberge cigarette case sold as imperial property, but how did it leave Russia and who did it really belong to? Image courtesy of Sotheby's.
Whose property is national property when the nation is personified in an individual.
One of the - more minor perhaps - problems of monarchy as a system of government.
The last Tsar of Russia was like all men a mess of contradictions.
There probably isn’t an ideal person in which to vest a semi-sacred national cult, and Nicholas II was definitely not ideal.
Let’s say structural social and economic factors caused the fall of the Romanov dynasty.
There are still humans involved in history.
And like Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, the last Russian royals can seem to be - with the gift of hindsight - feckless, selfish, even deserving victims.
They were probably just living as they expected to live.
So, while countless masses of Russian peasants who worshipped the Tsar like a god were being slaughtered in an army of 5 million men with fewer than 1,000 motorised vehicles, the royal family were the greatest customers of the world’s greatest jeweller, Carl Faberge.
Who really owned those treasures?
Many of them were smuggled out of the crashing Russian Empire by a doomed imperial family, who stuffed pillow cases full of opulent cigarette cases and cufflinks.
These pieces have subsequently been sold for millions - £612,000 for a single cigarette case in 2009 - along with the two “striped linen pillowcases” in which they were discovered. The sale was billed as the lost inheritance of Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, a Russian aristocrat and cousin of the Tsar who managed to escape the Revolution to live in the US and Germany.
But whose inheritance were they really?
The Lost Leonardo
Salvator Mundi, but who painted it?
Surely there can’t be controversy over the most valuable painting ever sold!
Unfortunately yes.
Partly over who bought it.
And partly over whether or not it’s what it says it is.
The Salvator Mundi cost $450m. It had previously sold for not much more than $1,000.
In between it had been extensively restored. But most importantly enough historical research and detective work had been done for the auctioneers to label it a Leonardo.
The buyer was initially thought to be Prince Badr bin Abdullah Al Saud acting on behalf of his nation. But it’s now thought he bid for Mohammed bin Salman, the ruler of Saudi Arabia.
The picture hasn’t been seen since. It’s been said to be on bin Salman’s yacht. It’s been said a special museum is being built for it.
It seems unlikely that the authorship of the picture will ever be 100% resolved. Many experts do believe it is a Leonardo. Some don’t even think it’s a very good picture.
We will have to wait for it to come off that yacht before it can be appraised again.
Freaks posters
Freaks has been reassessed now, but is it right to profit from something that used disability in this way?
Freaks is one of the strangest films ever made by a Hollywood studio.
It was released in 1932. The studio cut down Todd Browning’s original film considerably after negative test screenings, but some “uncensored” screenings were made.
Why is the film so shocking?
It’s not explicitly sexual or graphically violent, though it has some shocking scenes.
Extraordinarily, it was banned for three decades in the UK. It was illegal to watch it.
And it’s because it has people with disabilities in it.
How those people are portrayed has been the subject of much discussion since the film was released.
We know when it was made the people in it were found so offensive BY THE STUDIO who made the film that they were confined inside sets so people wouldn’t have to see them.
The film is now considered sympathetically.
But it’s still controversial.
And because it was withdrawn, publicity material from it is very rare and valuable.
A poster sold for over $100,000 last year.
Of course, lots of art ages badly and is inappropriate today. Is buying a poster of Freaks celebrating the original, obviously exploitative and othering, material, or what we now think is the film's real intention.
The Wu Tang NFT
Martin Shkreli in 2016. No-one liked him. He didn't care.
In 2015, Statten Island rap pioneers Wu Tang Clan (who have a whole host of controversial stuff to discuss if you want to) came up with something like an NFT.
A non-fungible token is a single item that cannot be copied.
They made a big - controversial - splash online, most famously as Bored Apes.
Wu Tang Clan’s NFT was a single copy of an album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.
They auctioned it for $2.7 million.
It’s controversial for a popular artist to sell their work to a single fan. Though more and more are doing it. Bob Dylan auctioned a single copy of a re-recording of his song Blowin' In the Wind for £1.5 million in 2022.
Unfortunately for Wu Tang the guy who bought the disc was Martin Shkreli
Shkreli became infamous when his company took over a pharmaceuticals firm and increased the price of one the drugs they (and only they at the time) made from around $13 to $750 a dose.
When Shkreli was later imprisoned the record was sold by the government to pay his debts.
After his release he was sued by the new buyer of the disc because he’d taken a copy and started playing it online.
Hitler watch
It wasn't exactly subtle. Hitler's watch sold for over $1 million despite protests. Image courtesy of Alexander Historical Auctions.
There’s famous good and famous bad.
Everyone has heard of Hitler.
Like everyone has heard of The Beatles.
But they’re very different kinds of fame.
Nazi war relics are out there. And some people collect them.
Hitler’s personal items seem to be in a different league though.
Do you went to sell to the sort of people who want a close, personal connection to the worst monster of the 20th century?
Someone did in 2022 when a watch owned by Hitler made $1.1 million at an American auction.
And it was a very Hitler watch, complete with a swastika.
Sales like these always call a fuss, and there were protests against this one, but it went ahead, with the watch making much less than its $2 million low estimate.
"Whether good or bad history, it must be preserved," the auction house told German media.
The end of Hitler's Nazi fantasy. But some still want to celebrate him.
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