In one of the more head-scratching moments of an auction season full of twists and turns, an anonymous buyer won the elusive code to crack the final part of a puzzling sculpture created by artist Jim Sanborn for the Central Intelligence Agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, after bidding $962,500 in an RR Auction sale.
As reported in the New York Times, the code pertains to an as-yet-undecrypted final part of Sanborn’s Kryptos, which was dedicated by the CIA in 1990. The sculpture features four passages of seemingly jumbled text, three of which have been decoded by amateur and professional cryptologists. “But the fourth passage, which is 97 characters long, has resisted the best efforts of brain and silicon,” as described by John Schwartz, a retired Times writer who has been reporting on the quest to solve the Kryptos code since 1999.
“Mr. Sanborn, who recently turned 80, decided to sell the final passage, known as K4, earlier this year,” Schwartz writes. “He had wearied of dealing for decades with fans who wanted to know whether they had solved the puzzle. He hoped to pass on to others the tasks of keeping the secret and responding to queries.”
It turned out that, earlier this year, a writer found material containing the solution to the mystery in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art in Washington, D.C., a discovery that cast the auction offering into question. But the sale went on as planned—and sailed past its $300,000–$500,000 estimate after an anonymous buyer topped out with a $770,000 final bid (which totaled $962,500 with fees).
“We did OK,” Sanborn said.
