Carol Vogel has the announcement that Peter Brant is selling his version of Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog at Christie’s this November with an estimate of $35 to $55m. The proceeds will create an endowment for Brant’s art foundation in Greenwich but the timing is somewhat defiant given Brant’s recent mixed success with selling Koons’s work even if there is a major retrospective coming.

But the value in the orange balloon dog may lie as much with the work being held by other A+-list collectors. By getting out first, Brant may be monetizing their ownership of the work more than he is cashing in on the reputational boost a Koons retrospective might bring:

“Balloon Dog (Orange)” is one of a series of five, each in a different color, conceived by the artist in the early 1990s. Four celebrated collectors own the others: Steven A. Cohen, the hedge-fund billionaire, has a yellow one; Eli Broad, the Los Angeles financier, owns a blue one; François Pinault, the French luxury goods magnate and owner of Christie’s, has the magenta version; and Dakis Joannou, the Greek industrialist, has his in red.