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| Passion Investments: Art |
It's Not Only Rock 'n' Roll
Richard John Pietschmann
10/01/2005
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American
concert posters, which were first printed in the
1920s,
advertised specific musical events featuring performers ranging from
Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday to Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling
Stones. For
decades, concert posters were the orphan child of pop
culture collectibles.
While thousands of aficionados flocked to lively
markets for baseball trading
cards, movie posters and other mainstream
collectibles to spark escalating
demand that pushed prices into the
stratosphere, concert poster enthusiasts saw
values of even the rarest
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| A circa 1957 Elvis Presley poster promotes “Tupelo’s
Own.” | and best posters remain relatively
modest. Until a few
years ago, these posters only rarely changed hands
in four-figure territory;
even scarce posters regularly sold for a few
hundred dollars. “Two years ago, my
Shea Beatles poster would have gone
for $35,000,” Diamond says.
But
recently, two developments
coalesced to clarify a murky market and make it
accessible to greater
numbers of collectors. In 2002, Bill Sagan’s purchase of
the Bill
Graham archives and the subsequent online valuation of thousands of
so-called psychedelic-era posters on his WolfgangsVault.com brought
transparency
to this particular market. Then, in 2003, the debut of
Marc and Debra Zakarin’s
ItsOnlyRocknRoll.com online auction site
facilitated simple point-and-click
bidding, attracting deep-pocketed
investors and eye-popping sales prices.
Many veteran
concert poster collectors remain astounded at how quickly
revalued
their once virtually secret passion became as it exploded into general
consciousness. Of the five bidders who ventured more than $50,000 for
the
record-setting Shea Beatles poster, Zakarin says three were not
established
music poster collectors. They had jumped over to this
market from the other
fields, such as collectible coins and sports
memorabilia.
“I realized this
stuff had tremendous likeability,
while at the same time I felt it was an
untapped segment of the art
market,” says New York collector David Swartz, who
dabbled in the hobby
until six or seven years ago when he sensed its approaching
maturation.
Swartz says his vast concert poster collection is now worth
millions.
“Movie posters were much more valuable and commanded significant
prices, and it didn’t make sense that major concert posters lagged so
far
behind.”
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