Emily Chan
A woman named Danielle Allen (@finding_finding_founder) accidentally bought a $4,000 original piece by Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dali at an art auction. The story of how she came to acquire such a piece is a hilarious one.
She ended up at the auction by simply following a road sign out of boredom. When she arrived, she found that a lot of Picasso, Dali, and other pieces created by big-name artists were selling for thousands of dollars.
She never intended to purchase any artwork, but that’s exactly what happened. After observing for a little while, Danielle decided to get in on the bidding action, just for fun and with the expectation that someone wealthier would outbid her.
But when she bid $4,000 for the 1974 Dali print (the minimum bid was at $15,000), she was taken aback when the auctioneer actually awarded it to her.
Danielle is currently looking for some buyers who will take the engraving off her hands.
“The bidding starts at $20,000. Come on, rich people, don’t let me down,” she said on TikTok.
The accidental art purchase wasn’t all bad, though, because it has turned Danielle into an art history buff, and the situation produced a lot of laughs.
When she bid on the piece, she couldn’t see it from her position in the room. So when she first revealed what it looked like on TikTok, she was hilariously underwhelmed, but she has now grown fond of it.
She learned that the piece is a depiction of Jean de la Fontaine’s “The Oak and the Reed” and gets into a little bit of the history behind that.
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