After the closure of the studio, the so-called ‘secondary’ market became the only way to buy Cybis porcelains. Truth be told, the majority of pieces have been sold that way for the past two decades; even when the studio had a website, their prices were so much higher than anyone else’s that their percentage of [...]
Category: Buying or Selling Cybis
Should You Insure Your Cybis?
Occasionally I am asked whether a collection, or a particular example, of Cybis porcelain should be insured. Several decades ago, my answer would have been “yes”; nowadays, it is an equivocal “it depends...” Let’s take a look at the available options using a limited-edition example: the Eagle Dancer. It retailed for $4000 in 1984, and [...]
The ‘How’ and ‘Why’ of Cybis Market Values
January 2023 update: If you are looking for actual numbers to determine the current market value of a limited-edition Cybis, the new Recent Selling Prices page will be more helpful to you. However, if you are trying to determine the value of a non-limited piece, or want to understand why all current market values of [...]
Edition Size Discrepancies: A Cybis Conundrum
From a collector’s point of view, the issue size of a limited-edition item is of major importance; it’s therefore disconcerting if the artist or manufacturer plays fast and loose with that particular attribute. The concept of marketing retail items as “limited editions” didn’t become widespread until the 1960s. The Boehm Porcelain studio was one of [...]
Selling Your Cybis (or, Where Do I Go From Here?)
Way way back in the Dark Ages B.E. (Before eBay), there were only two avenues for selling a piece of Cybis porcelain if you weren’t a retailer who was part of the Cybis Studio’s dealer network: You either placed an advertisement in the classified-ads section of a newspaper, or if you had a working relationship [...]
About Prices in the Cybis Reference Archive
I have received many inquiries from people asking for advice on pricing or valuing a piece of Cybis that they have received or wish to sell, and they sometimes asked why there is no indication of the actual current market value in my description of each piece in the Archive. For several years, the simple [...]
Making Sense of the Cybis Editions
You might see any of the following words used to describe Cybis pieces: Open, Completed, Retired, Variation, Special Edition, Numbered Special Edition, Event Piece, Limited Edition, Special Commission, Gift of State, and Artist’s Proof. What do they all mean? The edition type had an influence on a sculpture’s original retail price and its market value [...]
The Cybis archive 