ARSHAM SENDS HIS OWN DRAWINGS TO GET GRADED BY PSA

A pencil drawing of a piece of sports memorabilia sits inside a hard plastic slab, the same tamper proof case a six figure trading card would ship in. The label on the front reads PSA. The signature inside the case belongs to Daniel Arsham, not the athlete he drew. Arsham has spent the past decade drawing famous memorabilia by hand, then submitting the finished drawings to the same grading company that authenticates the objects themselves, and the slab has become half the artwork.

The Fall, The Ball, And The Wall Started This In 2012

Arsham traces the series back to a solo show at OHWOW Gallery in Los Angeles, The Fall, The Ball, And The Wall, which ran from January 20 to February 16, 2012 and examined the culture around sports, memorabilia, fame and authenticity. He drew some of the most recognizable memorabilia images by hand for that show, turning a mass produced object into a one of a kind drawing through the slow act of sketching it. That first gesture sat unfinished for over a decade.

Arsham calls the follow up inevitable rather than planned. This year he sent a new batch of those drawings to PSA, the company collectors trust to authenticate cards, balls and jerseys, and asked it to grade and encase a stack of drawings instead. His earlier drawing of a sports moment made from television broadcasts treated the screen as raw material. This series treats the grading company as raw material instead.

PSA Grades Cards, Not Concepts, Until Now

PSA authenticates around forty million cards and collectibles a year, and none of that infrastructure was built with a gallery artist in mind. Submitting a drawing for grading means the drawing gets treated exactly like a rookie card: examined, scored, sealed and numbered by the same process that turns a piece of cardboard into a five figure asset. Arsham is not asking for an exception to that system. He is asking the system to process his work on its own terms, which is the entire point.

The drawings themselves stay loose and observational, closer to a sketchbook than a finished illustration, the kind of mark making Arsham usually reserves for private studio pages. Encasing that looseness in a rigid, institutional slab is the tension the whole series runs on.

The Slab Was Built To Protect Objects. Now It Protects A Drawing.

A PSA slab exists for one reason, to certify that the item inside is real and to stop anyone from tampering with it once it is sealed. Arsham has taken that packaging and made it load bearing. The holder is no longer a case around the art. It is part of the sculpture, a plastic shell that argues grading and provenance now carry as much cultural weight as the object being graded.

That argument tracks with where sports collecting has already gone. A full arena floor recently went to auction at Sotheby's on the strength of its documented provenance rather than anything visually remarkable about a basketball court, proof that certification alone can carry a sale. Arsham is applying that same logic to a medium, fine art drawing, that has historically resisted being graded on anything but taste.

Authenticity Was Never About The Object

Arsham has said the systems that shape value interest him more than the objects themselves, and this series is the clearest version of that argument he has made. Is authenticity in the drawing, in the institution that certifies it, or in the story a collector chooses to believe. He does not answer the question. He built a physical object that forces you to sit with it, a drawing that is also memorabilia, a slab that is also a sculpture.

The honest reaction standing in front of one of these is confusion that resolves into respect. A drawing inside a trading card slab looks, at first glance, like a prop or a joke. It stops being funny once you notice the PSA label is not a costume. The grading is real, the case is real, and the only fictional part of the object is the sports moment Arsham drew from memory rather than from the field. That is the swap worth sitting with. Arsham did not fake the authentication. He earned it, then pointed it at the wrong thing on purpose.