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Fashion Week Daily
Interview with JR Bissell







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GET YOURSELF AN ARTIST WHO CAN DO BOTH
BUSINESS AND ART: THE VERSATILITY OF JR BISSELL
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Get Yourself an Artist Who Can Do Both
Business and Art - Daily Front Row
Working in a romanticized industry known for
rebelling against the status-quo, it's only natural for
an artist to not only make an enemy of money, but of
the whole "system" industry itself - from the dealers
to the market, the collectors to the auction house,
and everything in between. Artists must have a
passion and love what they do so strongly that it
eclipses the potential risk of never having these
financial gains, completely dedicating themselves to a
craft that might never see the light of day or public
recognition. As such, the distaste for these systematic
constructs is not just natural, but a source of self-
preservation.
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Sometimes blessings come out of the most
disastrous circumstances; for artist and buried
treasure aficionado JR Bissell, the craftsman was born
with an umbilical cord around his neck that resulted
in a near-death birth at the start of his life. Bissell
attributes his troubled entry into the world not only
to him being left-handed (in line with studies about
the correlation between left-handed people and
traumatic births), but also what he attributes to what
he calls his biggest blessing: access to both his left
and right brain. Having a father in big business who
started the 5th largest private mortgage company in
the United States, Bissell's childhood was packed with
business discussions with his father. His patriarch,
however, always recognized how Bissell would draw
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everything he saw and registered as cool, spending
hours every day until late at night drawing the things
that interested him like cars and sharks. When
college came around for Bissell, finance was already
becoming a less attractive degree compared to
marketing anyway; his father recognized marketers
ruled the world and that Bissell could combine
business with creativity in this degree as opposed to
attending an art college.
After getting his degree in marketing, Bissell started
running a business in the world of collectibles. While
it began in paper money when he first entered the
scene with Currency Grading & Certification, Bissell
quickly moved into pirate-era shipwreck gold because
of his childhood passion for Pirate Treasure, founding
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Pirate Gold Coins in the process. While spending the
last decade growing and managing tens of millions of
dollars in rare collectibles listed on eBay and many
other platforms, ranging from pirate treasure to
dinosaur fossils, Bissell has fostered an in depth
knowledge of the inner workings of collectibles
what the market needs, what the collectors look for
and the factors that make a collectible appreciate
over time. The ability to combine this in-depth
knowledge of the collectible's markets and his
lifetime experience of art has the potential to make
Bissell one of the biggest players in the art market in
a decade or two. Instead of making an enemy of
these systemic financial factors like most artists,
Bissell luckily has a brain that can do both. Working
A
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lengthy hours from 7am-11pm everyday, Bissell
manages tens of millions in collectibles on his sites
and works consistently on his art daily.
“I am constantly watching documentaries on all the
most famous artists, if a documentary about
business isn't already on," revealed Bissell. “The only
artist I really have seen that's had a similar
upbringing to me is Jeff Koons, a previous wall street
guy who turned into an artist. He seemed to know all
the similar concepts I knew before going into art,
although his background in stocks wasn't quite as
correlated as already being in collectibles like me."
Bissell has innovatively combined these two worlds of
rare collectibles and art in what might be the first
artist who truly attempts to encapsulate the historic
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significance and beauty of these rare artifacts in his
art work. A rendition of Picasso, Basquiat, or Dali with
Treasures from the 1715 Fleet Shipwreck seamlessly
integrated, learning and paying tribute to the grand
masters - while also doing his own original pieces as
well. “When I'm doing a 'Pirates rendition' of a
famous artist, I only have documentaries on that
artist playing in the background," said Bissell. "I'll play
them on repeat for months trying to dive as deeply as
possible into the mind of these artists while I study
their work.” While we can't know what the future
holds for this young artist and artifacts aficionado, it
seems safe to say that Bissell has all the necessary
equipment in his tool belt to be something big down
the line as he continues to develop and grow into his
craft.
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