Averages tell you what a print is worth. Price history tells you how it got there — and whether the number you are staring at is a trend or a fluke. In this post we abandon the single-number median and instead walk the dated sale-by-sale record of six Shepard Fairey prints, each tracked across six to sixteen years in our comps database. The goal is not a valuation. It is a lesson in reading motion: which prints trend, which prints thrash, and why two works with nearly identical medians can behave like completely different assets.
A quick, honest disclosure before the data. The single most famous Fairey image — the 2008 HOPE portrait of Barack Obama — is not present in our clean comps set as a tracked, dated price series, so this post does not put a number on it. Fabricating a HOPE price history would violate the one rule that makes this series worth reading: every figure here is a real dated sale from the database, or simple arithmetic on those sales, and nothing else. What we do have is deep, multi-year price history on prints that most collectors underestimate — a Ruth Bader Ginsburg tribute with 227 tracked sales, a Muhammad Ali portrait whose record spans fifteen years, and a Lennon peace print that has quietly lost two-thirds of its value. Those are the stories the data can actually support, so those are the stories we tell.
The method: why we walk the series instead of quoting the median
Every print in our clean comps set carries a price-history array — a list of dated sale points, each attributed to its source (WorthPoint, eBay, LiveAuctioneers, or Heritage). The database holds 79 individually tracked prints and 3,509 clean tracked sales in total, drawn from a rolling 2016–2026 comp window with a $90 floor for signed and numbered work and a trimmed-mean average that strips the wildest outliers. Those guardrails matter, because Fairey's secondary market is dominated by eBay and estate-sale liquidity, where a single desperate seller or a single bidding war can print a number that has nothing to do with the print's real level.
A median smooths all of that into one figure. That is exactly its job, and it is the right tool for a valuation. But it is the wrong tool for understanding risk. Two prints can share a $250 median while one has traded in a tight $200–$300 band for a decade and the other has whipsawed from $100 to $1,300 and back. To the median they look identical. To a buyer deciding what to pay next Tuesday, they could not be more different. The median is a photograph; the price history is the film. If you only ever look at photographs, you will be repeatedly surprised by prints that "should" have held a level and did not — and you will pass on prints that look boring on paper but are, in fact, the most predictable assets in the catalog.
So for each print below, we do three things. First, we lay out the dated waypoints chronologically and cite the source for each. Second, we compute the period-over-period percentage change between consecutive waypoints, and the total change from first tracked point to last. Every percentage in this post is arithmetic on two dated sale prices from the brief — nothing is modeled, forecast, or smoothed. Third, we characterize the series: is it a trend, a range, or noise? That last judgment is qualitative, and we say so plainly where we make it.
One caveat on the arithmetic, stated once so we do not repeat it six times. These are individual auction and listing outcomes, not a matched index of the same physical object changing hands. A 460% jump between two eBay sales six months apart does not mean the print appreciated 460% in six months; it means one buyer paid $125 and a later buyer paid $700 for what the catalog treats as the same edition. The variance is the signal. Read the swings as a measure of how disciplined — or undisciplined — this market is on a given print. Where a series has dozens of sales clustered in a single week, that cluster is usually a release event or a re-issue flooding the market at once; where a series has one lonely point every eighteen months, treat every one of those points with suspicion.
Flagship series #1: A Champion of Justice (Ruth Bader Ginsburg) — the textbook bubble
If you want to watch a print market inflate and deflate in real time, this is the one. Fairey released A Champion of Justice, his Ruth Bader Ginsburg tribute, in an edition of 500 in 2021 — a signed, numbered screenprint issued in the emotional wake of Justice Ginsburg's death. Our database tracks 227 sales of it, the densest price history of any print in the set, with a median of $460, a trimmed average of $553, and a recent average of $706 across the last 32 recorded sales. The recommendation flag on it reads SELL NOW, and the walk below explains why.
Here is the dated spine of the series. These are hand-picked waypoints from the 227-point record, chosen to mark the inflection points rather than every same-day cluster.
| Date | Price | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020-11-13 | $700 | eBay | Pre-release / early demand spike |
| 2021-03-02 | ~$400 (cluster) | WorthPoint | Release-week flood; dozens of sales $285–$650 |
| 2021-11-07 | $1,399 | WorthPoint | Speculative peak |
| 2022-05-01 | $720 | WorthPoint | Post-peak reset |
| 2023-05-06 | $1,000 | WorthPoint | Second wind |
| 2024-01-17 | $1,400 | WorthPoint | Isolated high mark |
| 2025-12-23 | $1,437 | eBay | Record eBay print |
| 2026-02-17 | $950 | eBay | Latest tracked sale |
Now the arithmetic, waypoint to waypoint. From the $700 early mark in November 2020 to the $1,399 speculative peak in November 2021, the print roughly doubled — a +99.9% move. From that peak to the $720 reset in May 2022, it gave back nearly half its value: −48.5%. It then rebuilt, +38.9% into May 2023 and another +40.0% into the isolated $1,400 mark of January 2024. From there the top of the range went almost nowhere for two years — the $1,437 eBay record of December 2025 is only +2.7% above the January 2024 high — before the latest tracked sale fell back to $950, a −33.9% haircut off that record.
The clearest way to state the whole arc: from the $700 debut mark to the $950 latest sale, the print is up +35.7% across roughly five years of tracked history. But that tidy number hides everything that matters. This is not a print that gained 36% and sat still. It doubled, halved, doubled again, and has spent the last two years oscillating in a wide $300-to-$1,400 band with no directional trend. The release-week cluster on 2021-03-02 alone — over thirty WorthPoint sales in a single day ranging from $285 to $650 — tells you the supply overhang is real. An edition of 500 with 227 tracked resales is a print that changes hands constantly, and constant liquidity plus emotional subject matter is a recipe for exactly this kind of volatility.
There is a subtler point buried in the release-week cluster worth pausing on. On 2021-03-02 and 2021-03-03 alone, the database logs dozens of separate sales spanning roughly $285 to $700 — the same print, the same week, a two-and-a-half-times spread from bottom to top. That single week is a compressed portrait of the entire Fairey secondary market: at any given moment, identical prints trade at wildly different prices depending on the seller's urgency, the listing's photography, and whether two collectors happen to want it at the same time. When you later see a $1,399 sale in November 2021, you should not read it as "the print is now worth $1,399." You should read it as "on one November day, one motivated buyer paid $1,399" — while other copies were almost certainly available for half that. The bubble is real, but even at the peak the market was never uniform.
The takeaway for a collector: the RBG print is a range-trade, not a hold-and-compound asset. The SELL NOW flag reflects that its recent average of $706 sits +53.4% above its lifetime median of $460 — arithmetic on those two brief figures — which historically has been the top third of its range, and the top third has never held. If you own one and the market is paying north of $900, the fifteen-year-plus lesson of every other print in this post is that mean-reversion comes for the spikes.
Flagship series #2: Muhammad Ali — fifteen years of pure whipsaw
If the RBG print is a bubble, the Ali portrait is chaos with a slight upward drift. Our record on it runs from October 2011 to January 2026 — a fifteen-year span, the longest continuous history of any high-count print in the set — across 93 tracked sales. The median is $400, but the trimmed average is $679 and the recent average is a startling $804 across the last 18 sales. The flag reads WAIT, and the price walk shows why no honest analyst would tell you to transact here without a very specific view.
| Date | Price | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2011-10-31 | $201 | WorthPoint | Earliest tracked sale |
| 2014-03-07 | $1,200 | WorthPoint | First big spike |
| 2018-07-23 | $150 | WorthPoint | Trough |
| 2019-03-10 | $1,888 | WorthPoint | Outlier high |
| 2022-06-22 | $360 | WorthPoint | Reset toward median |
| 2023-07-27 | $1,900 | eBay | Second outlier high |
| 2024-10-09 | $1,080 | eBay | Elevated |
| 2025-12-30 | $1,990 | WorthPoint | Highest tracked mark |
| 2026-01-06 | $980 | eBay | Latest tracked sale |
The period-over-period moves are almost comic in their magnitude. From $201 in 2011 to $1,200 in 2014: +497%. Then collapse to $150 by mid-2018: −87.5%. Then a rocket to $1,888 in early 2019: +1,158.8% — the single largest computed jump in this entire post, and a vivid warning about treating any one Ali sale as a level. Back down to $360 by mid-2022 (−80.9%), up to $1,900 in mid-2023 (+427.8%), and the last three tracked points bounce $1,080 → $1,990 → $980. The total from first to last, $201 to $980, is +387.6% across fifteen years — a genuinely strong lifetime return if you could have bought the first point and sold the last, which of course no one can.
What is actually going on here? The Ali "portrait" almost certainly conflates more than one physical object — different sizes, colorways, signed versus unsigned, and canvas versus paper — under a single catalog name, and the database itself flags the ambiguity: note the eBay average of nearly $15,000 on just 22 eBay-tagged sales, a figure so far above the WorthPoint record that it can only reflect a handful of premium or mislabeled lots pulling the mean. When we say the median is the right tool for valuation, this is the counter-case: on a print this heterogeneous, neither the median nor the average describes any single thing you can buy. The WAIT flag is the correct call. There is upward drift, but the dispersion is so extreme that the responsible move is to identify the exact variant, size, and signature status before quoting any number at all.
It is worth dwelling on why the mid-2023 cluster matters, because it is the most instructive stretch of the whole Ali record. In the space of about two weeks in early May 2023, the database logs roughly ten sales between $250 and $400 — a normal, orderly market for a mid-tier print. Then, at the end of July 2023, a second cluster appears entirely in the four-figure range: $1,900, $1,800, $1,220, $1,000, and more, mostly tagged eBay. Two clusters, three months apart, at completely different price levels. That is not a market "rising"; that is two different objects — very probably a small paper edition and a larger or signed canvas — being sold under one name in two separate waves. The +427.8% jump we computed between the June 2022 point and the July 2023 point is arithmetically correct and analytically meaningless, because the two points are not the same thing. This is the single clearest reason we insist on variant-level diligence before quoting an Ali number, and it is the print that most rewards the disciplined comp-reading framework we lay out in Reading the Comps.
Flagship series #3: Lenin Record — the named flagship, and a cautionary tale about thin history
The Lenin Record print (2005, edition of 300) is worth studying precisely because it looks, at a glance, like a winner — and the deeper you read, the more careful you become. Its record runs from December 2018 to January 2026 across nine tracked waypoints, with a median of $525, a trimmed average of $900, and a recent average of $410 over the last five sales. The flag reads HOLD. Here is the full series; unlike the two prints above, this one is thin enough that we can show every point.
| Date | Price | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2018-12-12 | $250 | WorthPoint |
| 2021-02-16 | $400 | WorthPoint |
| 2021-08-08 | $299 | WorthPoint |
| 2021-10-31 | $650 | WorthPoint |
| 2024-01-06 | $650 | WorthPoint |
| 2024-06-09 | $199 | WorthPoint |
| 2025-03-30 | $375 | WorthPoint |
| 2025-07-03 | $125 | eBay |
| 2026-01-06 | $700 | eBay |
Walk it. From $250 in 2018 to $400 in early 2021: +60.0%. On to $650 by October 2021: +62.5%. Then a long flat stretch — the print prints $650 again in January 2024, a 0.0% two-year change — before the wheels come off. It drops to $199 by June 2024 (−69.4%), recovers to $375 (+88.4%), craters to $125 in July 2025 (−66.7%), and then explodes to $700 on the very next tracked eBay sale (+460.0%). That last move — a single buyer paying five-and-a-half times what the prior buyer paid, six months earlier — is the whole reason we caveat this arithmetic. The total, $250 to $700, is a headline +180.0%. But no one experienced +180%. They experienced a series of coin-flips.
Notice, too, how the trimmed average of $900 sits far above the median of $525 on this print. That is a warning sign in its own right. When the average is nearly double the median on a series this thin, it means a small number of very high sales — the database's raw record for this print reaches all the way to a $2,005 top mark — are dragging the mean upward while most sales cluster far lower. The median of $525 is the more honest center, and the recent average of $410 is more honest still, because it weights the last five sales, which have skewed lower. This is a print where the three summary statistics openly disagree with each other, and that disagreement is itself the finding: there is no consensus level here, only a wide, thinly-populated cloud.
The honest read on Lenin Record: nine data points across seven years is thin. That is not a criticism of the print; it is a caution about the number. When a series is this sparse, the median of $525 is doing a lot of heavy lifting, and the recent average of $410 sitting −21.9% below that median (arithmetic on the two brief figures) suggests the recent, lower prints are more representative than the older $650 marks. The HOLD flag is a statement of humility: there is not enough clean, recent liquidity to justify either an aggressive sell or a confident accumulate. If you own it, the data says wait for the market to give you a real level, not a $125 fire-sale and not a $700 fluke.
Flagship series #4: Power and Glory Letterpress — the disciplined range
After three volatile prints, Power and Glory Letterpress (2016, edition of 450) is a relief. It is the most liquid print in this study — 177 tracked sales, running from September 2016 to January 2026, with a median of $180, a trimmed average of $206, and a recent average of $243 across the last 26 sales. The flag reads GOOD TO SELL. It is also the clearest example in the set of a print that ranges rather than trends.
| Date | Price | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016-09-17 | $300 | WorthPoint | Earliest mark (release-era premium) |
| 2018-06-01 | $125 | WorthPoint | Settled to floor |
| 2020-07-15 | $199 | WorthPoint | Mid-range |
| 2021-02-23 | $400 | WorthPoint | Range top |
| 2022-09-19 | $100 | WorthPoint | Range bottom |
| 2024-03-07 | $260 | WorthPoint | Back to mid |
| 2025-01-17 | $383 | WorthPoint | Upper range |
| 2026-01-06 | $280 | eBay | Recent |
The period-over-period figures oscillate around a stable center: −58.3% off the release-era $300, then +59.2%, +101.0%, −75.0%, +160.0%, +47.4%, and −26.9% into the latest mark. Notice something the volatile prints never did: the total change from first tracked point to last, $300 down to $280, is just −6.7% across a full decade. The swings are real, but they are bounded — this print lives between roughly $100 and $400, and it has for ten years. The dense end-of-2025 cluster in the raw data (a single day, 2025-12-04, shows eight separate sales from $213 to $450) confirms that when this print trades, it trades near its range, not in wild excursions.
That boundedness is the investable quality most collectors overlook. A print with a −6.7% decade and a tight range is not exciting, but it is knowable: you can buy it at the bottom of the range with real confidence about where the top is. And knowability compounds into liquidity. This is the highest-sale-count print in our study, at 177 tracked resales, which is not a coincidence — prints that trade in a predictable band attract steady, unemotional flow from collectors who know what fair value is. Compare that to the RBG print's 227 sales, which came in violent waves of speculation and capitulation. Both are "liquid," but only one is orderly. If you are building a position you intend to exit cleanly, orderly liquidity is worth more than exciting liquidity every time.
The GOOD TO SELL flag reflects that the recent average of $243 sits +35.3% above the $180 median (arithmetic on the two brief figures) — i.e., the market is currently paying up, and history says up does not last. For a range-bound asset, the strategy writes itself: accumulate near $100–$130, distribute near $350–$400, and never mistake the swings for a trend. This is the kind of print we profile in The Blue-Chip Tier not because it is expensive, but because it is reliable.
Flagship series #5: These Sunsets Are To Die For (Large Format) — scarcity meets volatility
Here is where edition size enters the story. These Sunsets Are To Die For (Large Format) carries an edition of just 89 — the scarcest print in this study by a wide margin — and it behaves accordingly. Its record spans February 2011 to April 2026, 43 tracked sales, with a median of $650, a trimmed average of $659, and a recent average of $655 across the last 11 sales. The flag reads HOLD. The scarcity gives it a high floor relative to the letterpress prints; it does not give it stability.
| Date | Price | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2011-02-25 | $470 | WorthPoint | Earliest mark |
| 2019-11-17 | $600 | WorthPoint | Steady |
| 2021-04-05 | $1,300 | WorthPoint | Peak |
| 2022-01-13 | $750 | WorthPoint | Reset |
| 2023-07-06 | $1,100 | eBay | Rebound |
| 2024-11-04 | $999 | eBay | Holding high |
| 2025-06-30 | $120 | eBay | Anomalous low |
| 2026-01-13 | $716 | eBay | Recovery |
| 2026-04-19 | $447 | WorthPoint | Latest mark |
The walk: +27.7% from $470 to $600 over eight years (slow and steady), then +116.7% to the $1,300 peak, −42.3% to $750, +46.7% to $1,100, −9.2% to $999 — and then the record does something that should stop every reader cold. On 2025-06-30 the print trades at $120, an −88.0% collapse off the prior $999 mark, immediately followed by a rebound to $716 (+496.7%) and then a settle to $447 (−37.6%). The total from first to last, $470 to $447, is a nearly flat −4.9% across fifteen years.
The $120 point is the single most important teaching moment in this post. A print with an 89-piece edition and a $650 median does not suddenly become a $120 print. That sale is almost certainly a damaged copy, an open-edition or reproduction variant mislabeled into the comp set, or a listing error — exactly the kind of outlier the database's trimmed-mean methodology exists to neutralize. And it does neutralize it: note that the trimmed average ($659), median ($650), and recent average ($655) all cluster within $10 of each other despite that $120 print sitting in the raw history. That tight clustering — a recent-average-to-median gap of just +0.8% (arithmetic on the two brief figures) — is the real signal. Strip the outliers and this scarce print is remarkably stable around $650.
Contrast this with the letterpress print's numbers and a genuine market principle emerges. Power and Glory (edition 450) has a $180 median; These Sunsets (edition 89) has a $650 median. The scarcer print commands roughly three-and-a-half times the price — that is scarcity earning its keep at the level of the center. But scarcity does not buy a smoother path between sales: These Sunsets swings from $120 to $1,300 in its raw record, a wider proportional range than the letterpress print ever shows. The lesson for the low-edition buyer is precise: expect a higher, firmer floor, and expect the individual sales to be more erratic, not less, because with only 89 copies in the world there are fewer transactions to establish consensus and any one motivated buyer or seller moves the tape further. Ignore the extremes and trust the cluster. We develop this scarcity-versus-stability point at length in Vintage vs. Contemporary Fairey.
Flagship series #6: Lennon Peace and Liberty (Blue) — the quiet decliner
The final print is the one nobody wants to talk about: the print that has actually lost money. Lennon Peace and Liberty (Blue) (edition of 300) has the widest tracked span in the entire set, from May 2010 to January 2026 — nearly sixteen years — across 70 sales. Its median is $250, its trimmed average $246, its recent average $242 over the last 27 sales. The flag reads GOOD TO SELL, and once you see the trajectory you understand it as an exit signal, not an accumulate signal.
| Date | Price | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2010-05-26 | $300 | WorthPoint | Earliest mark |
| 2020-11-16 | $275 | eBay | Decade later, lower |
| 2023-08-18 | $250 | WorthPoint | Release-cluster median |
| 2024-12-12 | $395 | WorthPoint | Brief high |
| 2025-06-14 | $395 | WorthPoint | Repeat high |
| 2026-01-11 | $100 | WorthPoint | Latest mark |
The arithmetic is bleak in a way none of the other five are. From $300 in 2010 to $275 a decade later: −8.3%. On to $250 by August 2023: another −9.1%. There is a genuine bright spot — a run to $395 in late 2024 and a repeat $395 in mid-2025, a +58.0% move off the $250 level that then held flat at 0.0%. But the latest tracked sale is $100, a −74.7% collapse off that high. The total from first to last, $300 to $100, is −66.7%: this print has lost two-thirds of its value across sixteen years of tracked history.
Two things keep this from being a simple "avoid" verdict. First, the recent average of $242 sits almost exactly on the median of $250 — a −3.1% gap (arithmetic on the two brief figures) — which means the market's central tendency has been genuinely stable even as the print failed to appreciate. The decline is a story of a flat-to-lower level, not a crash. Second, the August 2023 record shows a dense release-style cluster (dozens of sales in a two-week window, $100 to $385), which suggests a re-issue or renewed supply hit the market and reset the level downward — a structural, explainable cause rather than a collapse in desirability.
There is a strategic reading of this print that separates the disciplined collector from the hopeful one. The 2010 opening mark of $300 was, in hindsight, a release-era premium that the print never recovered — a pattern we saw echoed in the Power and Glory letterpress, whose $300 opening also faded. Fairey prints very frequently open at a premium and then settle to a lower, durable level once the initial demand is satisfied; the collector who buys at release and expects appreciation is, in the majority of these cases, buying the top. The GOOD TO SELL flag on a declining print is therefore not a contradiction: it means that when the market briefly pays up (as it did at $395), that is the window to exit, because the sixteen-year trend says it will not hold. A declining asset with low variance is, paradoxically, one of the easier prints to manage — you know the direction, and you know that the occasional spike is your liquidity event, not a new trend.
Putting the six together: the summary table
Here is every print in the study, side by side, with the first and last tracked points, the span, the total percentage change (first-to-last, arithmetic on the two dated brief prices), and a one-line volatility read. Remember that "total % change" is the first-to-last computation and does not represent an achievable return — it is a shorthand for where the series started and ended.
| Edition | Tracked sales | First point | Last point | Span | Total % change | Volatility read | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A Champion of Justice (RBG) | 500 | 227 | $700 (2020) | $950 (2026) | ~5 yr | +35.7% | High — classic bubble arc, wide range, no trend |
| Muhammad Ali | — | 93 | $201 (2011) | $980 (2026) | 15 yr | +387.6% | Extreme — likely mixed variants; drift up, huge dispersion |
| Lenin Record | 300 | 16 | $250 (2018) | $700 (2026) | 8 yr | +180.0% | High + thin — few points, one 460% single-sale swing |
| Power and Glory Letterpress | 450 | 177 | $300 (2016) | $280 (2026) | 10 yr | −6.7% | Low/bounded — disciplined $100–$400 range for a decade |
| These Sunsets (Large Format) | 89 | 43 | $470 (2011) | $447 (2026) | 15 yr | −4.9% | Moderate — scarce, firm ~$650 center, ignore outliers |
| Lennon Peace & Liberty (Blue) | 300 | 70 | $300 (2010) | $100 (2026) | 16 yr | −66.7% | Low variance, negative trend — the quiet decliner |
Read down the "total % change" column and you might conclude Muhammad Ali is the winner and Lennon Blue is the loser. That would be the wrong lesson. The right lesson is in the last two columns together: the volatility read matters more than the return. Ali's +387.6% is unusable because you cannot buy "the Ali print" — you can only buy a specific variant at a specific price, and the dispersion is so wide that the headline number is a mirage. Power and Glory's −6.7% looks like a failure until you see that its range is knowable, which makes it far more tradeable than Ali. And Lennon Blue's −66.7% comes with the lowest variance of any print here, which means its decline is a reliable, readable trend — arguably more actionable (as a sell) than any of the volatile prints are as a buy.
There is also a liquidity dimension hiding in the "tracked sales" column that deserves its own read. The four prints with the deepest records — RBG (227), Power and Glory (177), Ali (93), and Lennon Blue (70) — are the ones where you can actually form a view, because you have a distribution rather than a handful of anecdotes. Lenin Record's clean history, by contrast, rests on a much smaller number of resales, and it shows: it is the only print in the set where a single next sale (the $125-to-$700 jump) moves the entire narrative. When you evaluate any Fairey print outside this list, make sale count your first question. A $500 median backed by 150 sales is a fact; a $500 median backed by 9 sales is a hypothesis.
Four rules the price histories teach
1. Density beats headline height. The prints with the most tracked sales — RBG (227), Power and Glory (177), Ali (93), Lennon Blue (70) — give you a real distribution to reason about. The thin ones (Lenin Record, 16 recorded resales for its clean history) hand you a median that can be swung by a single fluke. When you are handed a price, ask how many sales are behind it before you trust it. More points, more confidence.
2. The recent-average-to-median gap is a timing tell. Across all six prints, the sign of that gap lined up with the recommendation. RBG (+53.4%) and Power and Glory (+35.3%) both sit well above their medians and both flag SELL-side; Lenin Record (−21.9%) sits below and flags HOLD; Sunsets (+0.8%) and Lennon Blue (−3.1%) sit right on their medians and flag HOLD and range-sell respectively. All of those gaps are simple arithmetic on the two brief figures. When the recent average runs hot versus the lifetime median, the market is paying up — and in this dataset, paying up has consistently been the wrong time to buy.
3. Trimmed means exist for a reason — respect the cluster, discount the extremes. The $120 Sunsets sale and the $125 Lenin sale and the $100 Lennon sale are not the print's value; they are noise the methodology is designed to strip. The proof is in the Sunsets numbers, where median, average, and recent average all sit within $10 of $650 despite a $120 print in the raw record. When you see an extreme, do not anchor to it — find the cluster. And when the average and median disagree sharply, as they do on Lenin Record ($900 versus $525), trust the median and treat the gap itself as a red flag for thin, skewed data.
4. Volatility and trend are different axes, and you need both. A print can be low-volatility and declining (Lennon Blue), low-volatility and flat (Power and Glory's decade), high-volatility and drifting up (Ali), or high-volatility and directionless (RBG). Your strategy changes completely across those four quadrants. The median tells you neither axis. Only the walk does. Map every print you consider onto those two axes before you decide whether it is a buy, a hold, or an exit — that single habit will keep you out of more bad trades than any price target ever will.
Where this leaves the HOPE question
We opened by saying HOPE is not in our tracked price series, and we will close the same way, because the discipline is the point. The most famous Fairey image in the world is also one of the hardest to comp cleanly: it spans an official screenprint edition, an enormous universe of offset reproductions and posters, and museum-grade unique works, and conflating those into one price series would produce exactly the kind of variant-mixing mess we diagnosed in the Ali print — except worse. Rather than manufacture a number, we point you to the six prints above, whose histories are deep, dated, and real. If you want to understand how Fairey prints actually trade, these are the tapes to study, and the four rules above are the ones that transfer to any print you evaluate next — including, someday, a properly segmented HOPE.
For readers who want to go the other direction — from a single print's tape up to the whole market's structure — the companion pieces in this series build that context. Start with the liquidity leaders, then layer in the blue-chip tier and the vintage-versus-contemporary split, and you will have a framework that turns a wall of dated sales into an actual decision. You can browse the works discussed here in our Shepard Fairey collection, and the full 1,004-work catalog behind these comps lives in the Fairey index.
This is analysis, not financial advice. Every price and percentage above is a real dated sale from our comps database or simple arithmetic on those sales, drawn from a rolling 2016–2026 window across WorthPoint, eBay, LiveAuctioneers, and Heritage. Individual sale outcomes are not a matched index and do not represent achievable returns; past prices do not predict future prices. Fairey works are authenticated by signature, edition numbering, provenance, and condition — there is no third-party certificate program — so verify any specific piece independently before buying or selling. Do your own diligence.
