Back in 2013, I discovered an artist on eBay who went by Brevki (Brad Everett Kirkman). He sold artist trading cards—simple, positive messages on small pieces of paper. What made them irresistible was the price: $1 each. I bought a couple and filed them away as delightful little reminders that art doesn’t have to be expensive to be meaningful.

For years, Brevki’s eBay presence went quiet. Then recently, I got an alert that he’d posted something new.

The Number 4: $4,444.44

The listing stopped me cold: “The Number 4 – a conceptual art piece – original by BREVKi.” The asking price? $4,444.44. Quite a leap from those dollar cards thirteen years ago.

But here’s the twist—you’re not buying a painting or a sculpture. You’re not even buying a piece of paper with “4” written on it. You’re buying the number itself. The actual number four.

Brevki’s artist statement is a masterwork of conceptual provocation. He frames the piece as “ownership as an act of conceptual authority”—a philosophical prank that asks whether ideas can be possessed the same way we possess land or buildings. When you buy The Number 4, you symbolically remove it from the public domain. Every time someone counts “one, two, three, four,” they’re theoretically trespassing into your private intellectual territory.

It’s absurd. It’s brilliant. It’s completely Brevki.

The piece explores how “four” carries weight across cultures—mathematical stability (the square, four cardinal directions, four seasons), superstition (luck in some cultures, death in others), and structural importance in how we organize reality. And now? It’s a commodity. An ownable thing. Or at least, Brevki invites us to pretend it is.

Not his first conceptual sale

This isn’t Brevki’s first foray into selling abstract concepts. In April 2025, he listed a piece of paper with “2.17” written on it for the remarkably reasonable price of $2.17. (It did not sell—though one wonders if the world simply wasn’t ready.)

Archiving the absurd

Because I enjoyed his auction description so much, I’m preserving it here. eBay erases auctions after a short period, and this one deserves to live on. What follows is Brevki’s complete artist statement and installation instructions—a document that’s as much a part of the artwork as the concept itself.

Item description from the seller Title: The Number 4

Medium: Conceptual ownership, certificate of authenticity, optional visual representation.

Artist Statement: The Number 4 is not a painting, sculpture, or installation. It is a claim, a declaration, that a human being can own something that exists beyond the physical world. The work explores the absurd yet profound question: can an idea, a pure abstraction, be possessed?

The buyer of The Number 4 does not acquire an image of the number, nor a sculpture shaped like it. They acquire the number itself. This is not symbolic ownership – it is ownership as an act of conceptual authority, a performance in the realm of language, law, and belief.

In our daily lives, we accept ownership over land, airwaves, or patterns of molecules. The Number 4 pushes this logic further, highlighting the arbitrary yet powerful ways society assigns possession to things. It forces the viewer to question: is ownership a fact, or a shared illusion?

The piece plays with the cultural, mathematical, and mystical weight of “four.” In mathematics, it is stability and structure — the square, the four cardinal directions, the four seasons. In superstition, it is both luck and death, depending on where you stand in the world. In human life, “four” organizes the universe, yet here it is reduced to a commodity.

When the buyer takes ownership, they symbolically remove “4” from public domain. Every time anyone counts — one, two, three… — they are, in theory, trespassing into private intellectual territory. This absurdity is deliberate. It is both an act of playful tyranny and a commentary on the privatization of the commons.

Ultimately, The Number 4 is an art piece that cannot be hung, touched, or even fully used without implicating everyone in its fiction. It is a number, a possession, and a social experiment all at once – owned not because it can be, but because we have agreed to profess it can.

Manifestations of the Number The owner may choose to represent The Number 4 in one or more of the following forms:

• Paper Form: Write or draw the number 4 on a piece of paper and place it on a wall, pedestal, or inside a frame.
• Tape Form: Create the number 4 using masking tape, painter’s tape, or another material directly on the wall.
• Projection/Digital Form: Display the number 4 digitally (screen, projector, LED, etc.), acknowledging that this is a visualization of ownership, not the number itself.

Display Conditions Representations should be minimal, direct, and unadorned — emphasizing the number as an object of possession.

Only one representation should be on view at a time to reinforce the singularity of ownership. When not installed, the piece continues to exist in the owner’s possession regardless of display. Interpretive Notes (Optional for Gallery Display)

A placard may be placed alongside the manifestation with the following text: “This manifestation represents The Number 4. The owner of this work holds sole conceptual ownership of the number itself. All visible instances are symbolic of that possession.”

Deinstallation Removing or destroying the physical representation does not diminish the work. The number remains in ownership regardless of manifestation.

Whether anyone actually buys The Number 4 for $4,444.44 is almost beside the point. Brevki has already succeeded—he’s made us think about ownership, value, and the strange agreements that underpin both art and commerce. And really, isn’t that worth at least four thousand dollars?

Or maybe just $1.