Artist Daniel Arsham Teams Up With Rally to Sell Shares for Unimog 404
For many, interdisciplinary artist Daniel Arsham’s creations are out-of-reach, but fractional collectible platform Rally is trying to make at least one of them more attainable.
From March 24 at 12 p.m. EST, those 18 or older with a U.S. Social Security number can purchase $20 fractional shares of the Arsham x Stone Island, a refurbished 1963 Mercedes Unimog 404 with coachwork by the apparel brand Stone Island. The asset is a security, qualified by the SEC, and fractionalized to allow access to all investors. With a total value/market cap of $135,000, there are 6,750 shares being offered for the vehicle. Knowing “it’s really hard to get in on the ground floor of anything Arsham-related,” Rally’s cofounder Rob Petrozzo said this venture offered “an approachable price point to start the relationship.”
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The artist’s collaborations had been a recurring topic of conversation among the team at Rally, and both parties first connected about possibly linking up last year. “We share a collective mindset more than anything else. He’s not just [designing] cars, art or objects — he’s a collector at heart, just like we are,” Petrozzo said.
Rally and Arsham also have other connections such as Porsche, which Arsham works with and which has invested in Rally, Petrozzo said. For Rally’s annual 15-mile drive to The Bridge, a showcase for post-war sports and competition cars in Bridgehampton, New York, last summer, the company recruited Arsham to join the brigade. The seemingly manageable short distance is a serious undertaking in the height of summer traffic in the Hamptons. “It stops along the way. It really takes all day. The problem is when you get a bunch of people with collector cars together, they tend to have conversations about the cars for hours at a time. The 15 miles end up taking about six hours,” Petrozzo said.
The artist brought his reconceived stripped-down version of the 1955 Porsche 356 Speedster, which “was the hit of the entire event,” he said. “That turned into a ‘What can we do together?’ conversation.”
Adept at sculpture, architecture, drawing, film and stage design, the Cleveland-born artist was raised in Miami. He first relocated to New York City as a scholarship student at The Cooper Union, where he earned the Gelman Trust fellowship award in 2003. Arsham later started Snarkitecture to partner with fashion brands and interior and architectural design resource to craft functional design objects.
The fact that Arsham’s studio is also located near Rally’s SoHo base was a plus. After checking out the cars in his personal collection, the craftsmanship of the 1963 Mercedes Unimog 404 stood out. Although the artist wasn’t planning on parting with it, that was agreed upon after both parties discussed how Rally fans would gravitate toward it. The collaborative military-and-modern style car with Stone Island was wrapped up a year ago. Aside from the $135,000 payment for the car, Arsham is not receiving any additional payment or equity directly from the offering.
The interdisciplinary American talent has a global reach. His sculpture can be found in Yorkshire Sculpture Park and his 20-meter-wide sundial made of snow and ice was unveiled at the Matterhorn in Zermatt, Switzerland. That naturally made timekeeping device was the first that he created for Hublot as its newest ambassador. More recently, he turned up at SXSW earlier this month to speak at Porsche House.
This fall Arsham’s work will be showcased in a dual international exhibition at Galerie Perrotin’s New York outpost and its Paris location. Although the early September opening may seem a way off, the bespectacled artist is already engulfed in the preparations. His 1.3 million Instagram followers got a preview at what is in the works. Over the weekend he posted an image of himself surrounded by “a couple hundred hotel room stationery drawings.”
His commitment to art is evident through his peripatetic lifestyle, Petrozzo said. “He is extra busy right now, but he is an artist, who lives with his art. He’s not somebody who is running around going to parties and going crazy [socially]. I went to school thinking I would be an artist. He has the career I wish I had. Every time I walk by his studio every morning, I think, ‘That could have been me.’ He’s someone who works in his creative space and we’re going to work around his schedule.”
Once this endeavor is off the books, the plan is to look at “what the next level of collaboration looks like,” Petrozzo said. “We never look at any collaboration, partnership or asset as a single one-off. All the relationships that we have had in the past, there’s always been something that comes later on and builds over time. We’re thinking about this very holistically.”
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