Episode 09: Space History Auctions with Cassandra Hatton
Have you ever wondered about what goes into planning and executing a space history auction? Emily and Alexa talk to Cassandra Hatton, Global Head of the Science & Popular Culture department at Sotheby’s auction house. Cassandra has set market records in space exploration, history of science and technology, natural history, and popular culture markets worldwide.
Show Notes:
Cassandra Hatton
Instagram: @the_lynx_eyed
Transcript:
Emily
Hello and welcome to the Art Astra podcast. I'm Emily Olsen.
Alexa
I'm Alexa Erdogan.
Emily
As a quick housekeeping note before we dive in, this is our last episode of the season! Thank you so much for listening these past few months. We’ll be back early next year with more episodes. Be sure to subscribe on your podcast platform of choice and/or follow us on social media for updates on when season 2 will start.
Also, this episode is particularly special because our next guest, Cassandra Hatton, was one of the first to volunteer to speak to us when we thought up this podcast back in 2021. We could not have a better speaker on the auction world and the space exploration side of it in particular, as she has been my mentor. This note functions also as a disclaimer of sorts, as you may remember from our introductory episode, I work on Cassandra’s team at Sotheby’s, though this podcast is designed and produced in Alexa’s and my free time and the opinions we express do not reflect those of our respective employers.
Alexa
With that out of the way, let’s get to this week’s interview!
[interlude music]
Emily
And today we have a phenomenal guest with us. Cassandra Hatton is the Global Head of Science & Popular Culture at Sotheby’s auction house in New York. She spent the first decade of her career as a rare book and manuscript dealer before working for Bonhams Auctioneers, where she founded and was made Director of its History of Science & Technology department. She joined Sotheby’s in 2016 as a Senior Specialist in the Books & Manuscripts department, where she inaugurated sales in Space Exploration, the History of Science & Technology, Natural History, and Hip Hop to great success. In 2021 she founded and was made Global Head of the Science & Popular Culture department at Sotheby’s.
Since then, she has been responsible for numerous high-profile and record-setting sales, including “Apex” the Stegosaurus, for the world record price of any dinosaur fossil at $44.6 million dollars; the record shattering “Buzz Aldrin: American Icon” sale, which totaled $8.2 million in just 68 lots, and reset the world record for any space flown artifact at $2.8 million for the Inflight Coverall Jacket that Buzz Aldrin wore to the Moon and back. Cassandra Hatton was also instrumental in the “Freddie Mercury: A World of His Own” sales, which totaled over £50 million in London last year; as well as the Source Code for the World Wide Web, which realized $5.4 million; Tupac’s self-designed Crown ring, which sold for just over $1 million; Biggie’s iconic crown from his K.O.N.Y. photo shoot at $600,000, and the Nobel Prize and Papers of Richard P. Feynman, which sold together for $3.8 million dollars in just 42 lots, amongst many other items.
Welcome, Cassandra to the show!
Cassandra
Thanks for having me. How are you?
Emily
Great. How are you?
Alexa
Yeah. Awesome.
Cassandra
Also great. Thank you.
Alexa
So I kind of have to ask right from the start, because my curiosity is killing me, what your path to this career was like initially. What did you want to be originally when you grew up? Did you always want to work at auction? Was there ever a point in your youth that you were, like, “I have to work in auction someday?”
Cassandra
No, I never even knew that auction was a thing other than… this is gonna date me, but the micro machine commercials when I was a kid. You have to be over a certain age to know this. Where they sell these little toys and that there's an auctioneer who's speaking really, really fast. But I did not know that that was a career or a job option at all. I grew up in a time when little girls were told that they had two choices for a career: to be a teacher or a nurse. And I thought, “Wow, that really sucks because I want to be an astronaut.” And that's what I was always striving for when I was little, was I wanted to be an astronaut until the Challenger disaster – which, I was in second grade and was the group of kids, where they wheeled in the television set and we all watched it live on TV. So my career ambitions changed after that and I wanted to be a jack of all trades. I wanted to know how to do everything. But yeah, auction was definitely not anything I had in mind.
Alexa
Mhm. That's… wow. That must have been such a formative experience to go through that at such a young age and see that on television– the Challenger disaster.
Cassandra
Absolutely. And it was..it was right at the time, there was a film called Space Camp that had come out, you know, based on the actual space camp and so every kid my age was obsessed with astronauts. Everybody wanted to be an astronaut, and then, you know, collectively, we all watched this disaster happen at the same time.
Alexa
So what did your career aspirations evolve to from…after seeing that from astronauts, what did you want to do next? And how did that lead on your journey towards career and auction?
Cassandra
From there, I went through many different ambitions. I thought I wanted to get a PhD and be a professor. I wanted to write French textbooks. Yeah, I studied linguistics as an undergrad. And I was actually going to go to a PhD at UCLA in linguistics. I took a year off between undergrad and grad school to go work for a rare book dealer who specialized in the history of science.
And one year turned into two. Two years turned into three, and after three years I realized I didn't really want to be a linguistics professor. Especially because at the time that I was looking at going to grad school, 2008 had just happened. The financial crisis had happened, and everybody I knew was going to Graduate School because there were no jobs and you could at least, you know, get a TA-ship, get some kind of stipend. You could live. So I was surrounded by people who had PhD's that they didn't use, they weren't going to use or that they hated at the end of the program, and so that also kind of influenced me. I thought, “Wow, this really isn't turning out to be what I thought it could be,” you know. I had this kind of grand dream of being this professor in this amazing office and a library and a cabinet of curiosities and none of my friends were experiencing that.
And I realized that I was. I was already experiencing that in my job as a rare bookseller, you know, I was surrounded by 15th, 16th, 17th century manuscripts, alchemical manuscripts, physics, mathematics, early printed books.I mean, the first thing that was put on my desk was a first edition of Physica by Hildegard von Bingen, and then Einstein's manuscripts on unified field theory. So I was living the dream, [laughs] and I just didn't realize it.
And it kind of went from there. I got really sucked into that world. I spent three years working for this rare book and manuscript dealer, and then was approached to go run a rare book and manuscript business, like an open shop in Los Angeles, where I learned how to run a business.
I was in charge of hiring, all of the buying, all of the payroll, paying all the bills, signing the checks, getting in the inventory, selling the inventory, building the database, building the website. I mean you name it, it was basically my own business. I ran it for someone who liked the idea of having a rare book shop but didn't want to actually do any of it. And we had a conversation one day where he said, “Look, Cassandra, we're just gonna pretend like it's yours. So if the shop makes money, you'll make money. If it doesn't make money, you're out of a job. And so is everybody else.” So, it was an amazing crash course in business and entrepreneurial -ship.
And I did that for five years and then I started my own business while going to grad school. I decided to go get a masters in history of science. I had my own business for about a year and was approached by Bonham’s auctioneers. I was living in Los Angeles at the time, and I would go and I would buy inventory at auction at Bonham’s to sell.
And the people I worked with, one of whom, you know, recently joined our team at Sotheby's, Adam Stackhouse. He and his colleague Catherine Williamson, you know, mentioned, “We're looking for somebody in New York. We need a senior specialist in books. Do you know anybody?” And I thought, “Maybe you know, maybe I do.” [laughter] And then a couple of my friends had emailed me and said, “You know, this looks like a really interesting job. It's in New York. You should apply.”
So I did, and they hired me and they moved me across the country and that's how I transitioned to the auction world. So I've seen both sides of this kind of business where you could be a dealer, you know you're buying inventory, you're selling inventory, to being an auctioneer.
And I've kind of figured out a way to blend those two mindsets into one, so it's definitely not something that I thought I would be doing. It's not a career that I could have gotten a degree in. I don't think that if I had set out to work in the auction business that I would have ended up in the auction business. And something I like to joke about with people is that I did actually apply to both Sotheby's and Christie’s when I graduated from college, just on a lark like, “I need a job,” you know? And they both deleted my application, like my resume was never read. So it was, you know, it was a career that I had to kind of hike and find the trail to. The trail was not already there.
Emily
It sounds too - What you mentioned before about wanting to be a jack of all trades just served you really, really well at each step of that journey. I have a follow up question: so you were working in rare books and manuscripts, how did you get into the space artifact market?
Cassandra
When I joined Bonhams, I was hired to replace a specialist who was moving back to London, and he was a books and manuscript specialist. He had been doing space sales with the consultant and so when I joined, they said, “Guess what, Cassandra, you're the space specialist now.” And I said, “What? I don't know anything about space exploration! You know, despite wanting to be an astronaut when I was a kid like this wasn't…I did not have any expertise in this area. And I take expertise very seriously, you know, it's not something you can just Google the answers, like you really have to have the experience and the background and such. So, for most of the first half of my life, I was incredibly motivated by the fear of failure, so I went and I read everything I could, looked and read every auction catalog, looked up everything that had ever sold, read all of the books and put together a sale.
And I, you know, I think something that has been useful is having a skill– and I think this is something that everybody should master– is how do you map what you already know onto something else that you want to be doing? How do you transfer those skills?
And one thing I noticed in the space exploration area is a lot of the important artifacts, the flown artifacts, were paper materials. They were books. They were flight plans. They were flight logs. I knew how to do the deep, serious bibliographical research on books, you know, I was trained on Galileo and Newton and Darwin and Einstein, like these are very serious academic works that many, many scholars had written on, and there's a very formal way to approach studying and describing those objects. So I took the exact same approach that I did for, you know, a first edition of The Origin of Species to flown flight plans. And I saw that nobody had done that before because previously the people who had sold these things were enthusiasts, you know, clearly knew about the subject matter, but did not have a background in how to formally, accurately, academically describe an object like that. So that's how I was able to kind of move over in that direction as I started kind of with the paper materials and then figured it out from there.
Alexa
Over the course of your work in the space field afterwards, I always hesitate to ask you to pick favorites, but do you have a favorite space artifact or maybe a few that you've sold in your time there?
Cassandra
I think that I would have to say generally the flown artifacts or the flown kind of flight plans and documents and that's because over the course of 12 years now selling space flown artifacts, I realized that they're all kind of a puzzle.
The short answer is no, I don't have a favorite one because I couldn't possibly pick but the whole process has been exciting because, you know, there's an artifact I sold 12 years ago that unlocked answers to an artifact that's on my desk now. There was a thing I sold seven years ago that was the evidence that told me the truth about another object. So that's what's been really exciting is that I have had both the physical objects…You know, maybe it's a water dispenser or a jacket or some other kind of like… rotational hand controller, you know, hardware.
…And I've also handled the paper materials that describe these objects and how they are used and seeing through these objects, which are really primary source materials, right? So this is… I did my undergrad in linguistics and history. I had three majors. We don't need to get into all of them. [laughs] But you know, I was trained on – You need your primary source material in order to really do your research, and I realized that all of these objects that were worth money and super interesting were primary source materials and that many of the things that we believed to be true about the space program were not true, and that the people who had written a lot of the history books did not have the benefit of sitting with these artifacts because they were all sitting in various astronauts’ closets or garages or wherever. So I think more than a single object, it is the accumulation of these objects together that have put me in a really privileged spot to have a very unique understanding of the Apollo space program that I would venture to say even the curators at the Smithsonian have not had the same level of opportunity that I have.
Emily
That's absolutely fantastic. Also as a follow up to that, could you give an example in terms of an artifact coming across your desk that unlocks a story?
Cassandra
Sure! During Apollo 11–this is going to be a little bit of a long story, I hope that's fine. [laughs] So Neil had a Hasselblad camera. He was taking pictures on the lunar surface. This is why we only have pictures of Buzz. We don't have pictures of Neil because Neil was the photographer. And as he was going to climb the ladder back into the Eagle, he dropped the camera and the case where the film magazine is housed popped open a little bit.
What he didn't realize is that a bunch of moondust got into the film magazine. When they came back and the astronauts had to go into quarantine, they took the film magazines and gave them to this young man who was the film processor. And so he's opening things up and, you know, taking the film magazines out and getting ready to process them. And he opens this one and a big cloud of moon dust hits him in the face like [sound effect] you know, and everybody starts freaking out, “Oh my God.” You know, because they didn't know what was going to happen with moon dust. You know, is it diseased? Or are we all going to crumble because we breathe it? Who knows. So he's got moon dust all over his hands all over his body. They put him into quarantine with the Apollo 11 astronauts. So he's in there for weeks with these guys. They have to strip him naked and, like, put him through a bleach shower or whatever kind of decontamination shower it is.
And he went and he got a piece of Scotch tape. And before they put him through DCON, put his finger on the Scotch tape so he could keep some of this moon dust. Now this is. I'm gonna try to make this as clear as possible, because this is just like a spider web that took me a little while to unravel. So there's that piece of tape. He goes into quarantine. After he gets out, he gets to go back and process the film.
The film magazines were in this bag. And inside the bag was a little note from Buzz that says, “OK, These are film magazines, you know, M,N, P. Process them in this order. This one is the Moonwalk photos. This is the approach…” So the guy doesn't think anything of this paper. He shoves it in a pocket, follows the instructions and that's that.
Years and years later, he auctions off this poster. So the guys, Neil, Buzz and Mike made this really fun poster where they put pictures of him with the film magazines and they signed it and it was really nice. He added the piece of tape with the moon dust on it.
He kept the little sticker from the film magazine that had the moonwalk stickers or moonwalk photos and put that on the poster. And then the note that Buzz wrote to him saying, “Process the film in this order” is stuck on this poster. So he sells it at auction. I don't even remember. It might have been Regency Superior, one of these auction houses that doesn't really exist anymore.
This fellow named Florian Noller buys the whole poster just for the piece of tape and the moon dust. And he cuts that tape up in little teeny pieces and makes all of these certificates and starts selling moon dust. And then he gets into a bunch of trouble because you're not allowed to do that.
But he's in Europe, so the United States federal government couldn't go, you know, they couldn't get to him. So he still got some. But any sales of that tape in the US have been stopped. And the tape has been seized. He then went and removed all of the little bits and bobs from the poster so the little film magazine sticker he sold somewhere else. The note he sold somewhere else. The board he sold somewhere else and this fellow went and bought all of these pieces up because he was trying to get it all back together so he spent years. He bought the poster. He bought the note, he bought the sticker. He'd been trying to get the moon dust back because he wanted to reassemble it.
He didn't get all of the moon dust back, but he got everything else. And he called me when we were doing our 50th anniversary sale for Apollo 11 and said, “can you sell this poster?” Now previously, when people had described it, it was just a poster with some photos and some stickers on it.
But when he brought it in, and I set it on my desk, I realized – who cares about the poster? What we had on that poster was the first manuscript to be written on the Moon. That's what we had. And not only that, but it just so happened that Buzz Aldrin had given me a number of different items to sell in that same auction, which included several pages from the Apollo 11 flight plan. Now one of those pages, and this is the page that you know, your historians, people at the Smithsonian have seen that says, “Process the film magazines in this order. You know, magazine P is supposed to be this, N is supposed to be this, and M is supposed to be this…”
And I knew that, in fact, things were in a different order and why they were in a different order. And it was because Buzz got super excited. The flight plan gave them step by step instructions on what they're gonna do. But as you're approaching the Moon, like you're not paying attention to which film magazine you're getting. You're just gonna grab one and stick it in the camera. And that's really what happened. But nobody would have known that full story. They didn't have those magazines there, or the poster and the flight plan and all of those bits together side by side.
So, that's kind of an example. I could have done a much deeper dive on that, but you know to have these two different objects that ended up in completely different hands, finally kind of rejoined, helped us have a better understanding of what was really going on during the mission. Because it's also not like Buzz narrated that he was doing this. You can go online and you can get the audio transcripts of the mission. He's not reading, “OK, I'm writing a note because I messed up and I grabbed the wrong one,” you know? It’s just a very discrete little note that he's stuck in a bag.
[laughs]
But it's a really interesting part of the history.
So that was really fun. I love when you sit down and you figure out the puzzle pieces. I think in that vein, the other favorite space object was the Apollo 13 flight plan. That was really…besides what it is, right? It's from this incredible— you know, the greatest mission, the one where we proved that if we all come together we can overcome even the greatest of challenges.
But if anybody’s seen the Apollo 13 film, they'll remember Jim Lovell's character ripping the front cover off of the Apollo 13 flight plan to improvise the air scrubber on the CO2 situation, right?
So I get this flight plan and I'm looking at it and the front cover is very firmly attached, with the note fully handwritten by Fred Haise to and I'm forgetting his name, but the person who actually wrote the full flight plan thanking him for doing such a great job and providing this document that helped them get back alive. And it's signed by the full Apollo 13 crew, right?
So I'm like, “God, this is interesting.” And I go online. I start going to my sources, right: the audio transcript. I go to the stowage list, like all of the kind of… Apollo primary sources for what is supposed to be happening. So I listen to the audio transcript and I hear them say,
“Take the EVA cue card.”
Now, “EVA Cue card” does not roll off the tongue like “front cover,” right? So you can see why they kind of switched it up in the film, but I had kind of a hilarious moment with another…we’ll say space historian who I was talking to about this flight plan. And I was like, “I can't believe it. I've got the Apollo 13 flight plan on my desk,” and he's like, “there's… you don't have that. You don't know what you're talking about. Everybody knows that the front cover was ripped off of the flight plan.”
I'm like, “And yet the front cover is there.”
And we, you know, we argued and argued, and I came back and I said, “you know, here are the receipts. Here's the evidence. What you're remembering is the film and not the data.”
And that was actually a really…Beyond it being an amazing artifact and a great time just researching it, because it was full of all sorts of really interesting information, handwritten notes, etc. It was a really important lesson that I have always kept in mind for everything that I sell is: I do not care what the authority says about an object. It does not matter to me how many PhDs, how important you are. I want to see the data.
And this is something that I've encountered time and time again, is people who make a quick assumption or they choose to go with the argument by authority.
And really, it's the data. What does the data tell you about these objects?
So that, I think, has been one of the most interesting things throughout my career as I have ignored what authorities tell me “that's wrong. That can't be right. That can't be right” and just kept my eyes on the data and that has always told the truth.
Emily
I love that. I also love that our very first episode, we talked about lunar dust and the damage it poses to people, and the fact that it's a recurring motif is just incredible.
Alexa
That's… that'll get you. That's terrifying.
Cassandra
Terrible moon dust.
Emily
Also speaking of puzzles, besides holding the auction record currently in space history with Buzz Aldrin's collection, you also were in the news recently because you set the new record for dinosaurs at auction. How did you jump from selling space and technological artifacts to Natural History and dinosaurs?
Cassandra
It was similar to the jump from books and manuscripts to space and tech. I took what I learned from all of those previous experiences. I looked at the Natural History and dinosaur market and I saw that there was a lack. Not in amazing artifacts. You know there are incredible things out there. But I looked at who had previously been selling these artifacts, be it auction houses or dealers, and saw a real hole in how these things were described and documented. And after having spent now it's 21 going on 22 years in the combined dealer and auction business and having handled manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, antiquities— you know, all kinds of very valuable, very rare objects.
I know what kind of documentation people need to prove the legality of ownership. Have these things move around the world legally? How do you prove the provenance? How do you prove authenticity? How do you describe them? How do you research them? You know, I've from all these different objects, what are the kinds of people who are going to spend $100 million on a painting expecting to see in terms of paperwork, documentation, description, etc. And I wasn't seeing that for dinosaurs.
I was seeing a lot of argument by authority. A lot of people who were just “ohh trust me, I know what I'm talking about” or who would make statements like, “In my professional opinion…” I don't care about anybody's professional opinion. I want the data, you know. In fact any description that begins with “in my professional opinion,” I already know it's going to be baloney.
[laughs]
Cassandra
That’s not what I wanted to say but [laughs].
And this was, you know, what I saw for dinosaurs is I saw a lot of people making really wild claims. I would see people claiming, “Oh, this is the best, this is the most complete. It's the biggest in the world. It's the most this. It's the most that.” I'm like, “OK, amazing. Where's the data? How do you know? What are your sources? How do I know, like, where did this come from? How do I know it's legal? How do I know it's not fake?”
And nobody was providing those answers. They had all just been used to dealing in a world where people just kind of took them for their word.
And I saw that there were, you know, a lot of legal problems, a lot of people who had maybe overpaid for something while, at the same time, some really important artifacts that were being overlooked because they weren't being described in a way that people would take seriously.
So I figured out how to start selling fossils. You know, I started out small. I think I sold a Triceratops skull and from the Triceratops skull, I think I sold two Triceratops skulls. I just slowly but surely started adding fossils and kinda dipped my toe in the water.
And eventually somebody agreed to let me sell their dinosaur, you know? And it just kind of went from there. And like I've done for every auction, for every interview I've done, for every public speaking appearance, I go back and I obsessively analyze it.
You know, if I do a TV interview, I watch it 15 times. I take notes on the ums and the you knows and try to delete them from, You know, how do I do this? I just said, “you know.” Ugh, it drives me nuts. So hard to get rid of them.
But it takes time and it takes analysis, so I do the same thing for my auctions. I go back and I look at what went right, what went wrong? How can I improve? Can I catalog things better? Can I be more accurate? What didn't seem to be compelling to clients? Were there things that people weren't bidding on because they just weren't interesting? Or did I have the price wrong? Was the photo bad? Was the description wrong? And I've kind of done that obsessively for the past 20 years. There's, I think, always never feeling like it's perfect, never feeling like I've gotten it totally right. That there's always a way to improve has been very helpful and I think that's what led to us being able to sell the most expensive dinosaur to have ever sold is that we took this seriously and the constant improvement seriously.
And I think probably the most important…This is what I always tell my son. Your number one competition is yourself. Don't look at what other people are doing. Don't worry about other dealers or other auction houses. You know, with him, it's like, “don't worry about the other soccer players on the field. Just try to beat yourself. Do better than you did last time. Do better than you did last time.” And that really, I think, is the key to success in any field because otherwise you're just copying other people. If you're just trying to do what they're doing better than they did, that’s boring and unoriginal. But if you are paying attention to yourself and doing your own thing, you come up with interesting things. You innovate, you improve. And I think that's what we do at Sotheby’s. We do that, at least in our department.
Emily
I am especially struck by how big a proponent showing your work is in all of the sales that you've done, especially in the Science and Pop Culture department, where like you were referencing the stowage lists, like doing the research of cross referencing what artifact was on what mission at what time and in what vehicle. And it is one of those translatable skills that you mentioned earlier about…it’s the same with dinosaurs, in terms of following the objects through the paperwork and where they're coming from and what stages they're at as they're found versus when they get to market.
Cassandra
Yeah. There are, I think, underlying principles that apply across the board when you turn your math homework in when you're a kid, you have to show your work right? The teacher doesn't care if you guess the answer right. The teacher wants to know if you know how to solve the problem. Just like that argument by authority, I don't care what the expert’s “expert opinion” is. I wanna know what the data is. How did that person come to their conclusions? Because sometimes people come to the wrong conclusion.
So, I have always leaned on, “Hey, you don't need to believe me. The data is here. This is an objectively great thing.” Apex was an objectively incredible dinosaur, and here's the data. Read the data.
Every other incredible object that we've sold has been the same thing. And when I see an object being sold and that data isn't there, I immediately wonder why. That makes me suspect that something is up. Why would you hide the truth about something?
With dinosaurs, why would you hide where it came from? Why would you not want people to know where it came from? Is there a reason?
[whispers] Are you hiding something? Usually…
[laughter]
…Yes!
[laughter]
Alexa
I do love that, though, that approach that evidence sort of usurps authority in the sense and that like throughline through not just the work that you and your folks do at Sotheby’s and in the auction business. But also it sounds like in your personal life too, when you were talking about reviewing all the work that you yourself are doing and going back and taking notes on how to improve, you're like looking at data over and over again and optimizing always.
Cassandra
It's the scientific method.
Alexa
Yes!
Cassandra
It is the scientific method. I have to be true to what it is I do for a living.
And I think it applies to everything. If you're cooking, you make a dish, it doesn't taste right. You go back, you review what you put in there that was funky. You try something different. You keep trying over and over again until you get it right. You do that for everything in life, you are going to be successful. There's just… There is no alternative. That is how you are successful at everything you do. You keep trying and trying and trying and trying and trying until you succeed.
And that is something I didn't learn until I was in college. I always thought that you were just born successful. I was raised in a house that had the kind of fixed mindset. And so you were either born a genius or you weren't born a genius.
And it wasn't until I was older that I learned, like, maybe I'd have to study a little bit. [laughter]
Like, “Oh my God, I didn’t just get an A on this exam. Is there something wrong with me?” No! You have to, you know, you have to work at it so I learned then that failure is not an actual thing. Failure is just the choice not to keep trying. That's what failure is, is you choose to stop trying.
If you keep trying, you will succeed. Sometimes it takes really, really long. [laughter] If you're lucky, it won't take that long.
Alexa
I do love that a lot. I was going to ask you actually what advice that you might have for people who are sort of interested in that line of business. But it sounds like you provided some good pieces already. Are there any off the top of your head that you wanted to make sure we share?
Cassandra
Yes. First, if a job does not exist, go make it, because my career did not exist.
If I, as I was saying earlier, if I wanted to just go apply to my job, it wouldn't have been there. I had to actually create the department. I've had to fight for everything that I have achieved in my career. Nobody asked me if I wanted to do it.
Nobody said, “Gee, Cassandra, you'd be great at doing this. We're going to let you do this.” I had to go and demand it. I had to fight for it.
I've had people say no throughout my career and I would say ignore those people if they say you can't do it, find a way around it. If they close the door in your face, kick the door open, you know.
Make it happen. There will always be people who will try to stop you. And find a way around those people or plow them on down, you know.
That is, I think, a very important thing, particularly if you wanna do something that is out of the norm, that is unusual. You have to fight for it, and if you are willing to do that, you will be successful at it.
So even if people tell you “your idea is crazy, that's impossible. That's never been done before, or that isn't done. Or that's not how we do it around here,”
I don't care. That's not how I do it. This is how I'm going to do it. I don't care how you do it, and that's the kind of attitude you have to have.
You know, I think we've all grown up in a world where we've been told that we're supposed to act a certain way and be a certain way, particularly as women. You know, if I had listened to people tell me that women could only be nurses and teachers which are both —- Hey, my mom's a teacher and my aunt is a nurse and they're both amazing at what they do. That wasn't what my path was, and I would have grown up to be a terrible nurse or a terrible teacher, or maybe not. I don't know, but you know, if I'd listen to people tell me that those were my only options, none of the department would be, you know, we wouldn't be selling dinosaurs and spacesuits and such, so you know, don't listen to other people who tell you you can't do what you want to do. Just ignore them.
Emily
Thank you. That's so, so heartening. And we do have one last question. Where can people find you online?
Cassandra
Instagram's probably the easiest. My handle is the_lynx_eyed. And I'll tell a very quick story about what the heck does “the lynx-eyed” mean?
And that comes from the Accademia dei Lincei, which was the 17th century Italian scholarly society that supported the work of people like Galileo.
And they chose the lynx as their mascot because that is the animal that has the greatest eyesight, better than an eagle, and the concept was we have an eye for what is important. We find the evidence, we find the details, and that is what is important. And you know, my thesis was on Galileo. So I'm a little obsessed with him. But he was the person who did not accept authority. He went by the evidence that he saw in his telescope and yeah, it got him in hot water and tried before the Inquisition. But he changed the world.
So, there we go. The_lynx_eyed.
Alexa
I love that.
Emily
Yeah, we'll be sure to drop that in the show notes as well as…I know that you've done a couple videos for Sotheby's talking about specific artifacts, and I'll make sure that that's on our show notes page as well.
Yeah, this has been absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Alexa
Yeah. Thank you so much. This was so enlightening.
Cassandra
Yeah. Thank you both so much for having me.
[interlude]
Alexa
Thank you for listening to today’s episode. As a reminder, all show notes and links will be available on our website at artastra.space.
Emily
If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please rate us on spotify or leave us a review on apple podcasts. Be sure to subscribe to be notified when we drop our next episode next year. We are also on Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky at artastrapodcast.
Alexa
We hope you all have a wonderful rest of the year! Thank you so much for coming along this journey with us.
Emily
Until next time!
Alexa
‘Til next time!