At last, a happy ending — we hope — to the [tag]Artomatic[/tag] saga: A week after glass artist [tag]Tim Tate[/tag] retrieved part of his lost sculpture via an elaborately jokey ransom drop, a benefactor bid $1,500 for the new artwork Tate is creating from fragments of the old.

Best of all: The buyer appears to be a genuine fan — someone who says he fell in love with the original sculpture and hoped to buy it long before its disappearance from the Crystal City art event turned it into a Reliable Source sensation.

The original piece, called “The Rapture,” was an etched glass “reliquary” containing a toy rocket ship. The buyer, a Virginia man who refused to be identified in print, saw it on Artomatic’s opening night. “There’s something that appealed to me about it,” he said. But when he came back a few days later, it was gone.

The Virginian followed the saga as it unfolded in this column — the ransom demand for $10,000 in Monopoly bills, our crazed under-cover-of-darkness trip to the Mall with Tate to meet the masked fellow who identified himself as “The Collector,” the manifesto he left behind about society failing to value its art. When Tate vowed to make a new sculpture and auction it on behalf of Artomatic, the [tag]”Rapture”[/tag] fan was the sole bidder. He declined to be identified for fear of becoming a target of The Collector or a copycat.

“I know they were trying to make a statement about underappreciated art,” he said. “But I appreciated it before they even started this.”