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| Passion Investments: Art |
It's Not Only Rock 'n' Roll
Richard John Pietschmann
10/01/2005
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VALUE JUDGMENT
Online auction sites have
energized the traditionally sleepy market for concert
posters. Once
hoarded only by avid music fans, posters advertising specific
concerts
by artists such as the Beatles and Billie Holiday are now valuable
items that command six figures. Novices in this quirky market, however,
should
beware: design, era, artist reputation and authenticity are
everything to
finicky collectors. Some posters are priceless while
others are not worth the
paper they are printed on.
| Even with its growing popularity, the hobby has many
quirks. Habitués draw a clear distinction between collectible (and
potentially
valuable) concert posters created to sell tickets to a
specific event, and
generic promotional posters that have no real
collectible value. Furthermore,
the concert poster market seems tepid,
at best, for posters produced after 1970.
“I tell people I turn into a
pumpkin at midnight on December 31, 1969,” Howard
says. Zakarin agrees:
“All the serious guys use that as a break point. A Four
Tops poster
from 1969 could be $1,000, while one from 1970 could sell for $150.”
More crucial, however, is the difference between
concert posters labeled
“cardboard boxing style” and those termed
“psychedelic” or “art rock.”
Boxing-style posters are straightforward
advertising tools designed in the
highly readable style of
prizefighting placards and printed on sturdy cardboard.
They have been
in use since the 1920s, although they peaked in popularity during
the
seminal rock decades of the 1950s and 1960s.
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| PSYCHEDELIC POSTERS: Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead played
Bill Graham’s
“The San Francisco Scene in Toronto” in
1967 | The most coveted examples
feature iconic
performers such as the Beatles, Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly.
Identified with the eastern half of the United States, most
boxing-style posters
were taped onto record store windows or nailed to
utility poles (the
record-setting Beatles Shea poster was torn from a
pole in Brooklyn). “The whole
reason these posters are collectible and
valuable now is that they weren’t
then,” explains Howard, who is so
passionate about his hobby that he maintains a
website
(postercentral.com) devoted to it.
Psychedelic posters were born in
the mid-1960s under the aegis of famed San Francisco concert impresario
Bill
Graham, and for a few flamboyant years helped sell tickets to
concerts of the
Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane and the
Doors. Poster artists
such as Wes Wilson, Stanley “Mouse” Miller, Alton
Kelley, Rick Griffin, Victor
Moscoso and Lee Conklin created these
intensely stylized graphic extravagances.
They proved so visually
appealing and emblematic of their zeitgeist that they
were prized as
art almost from the moment of their publication and were
collected from
the start. Largely a West Coast phenomenon, they were primarily
printed
on paper rather than cardboard and routinely produced in multiple runs,
of which only the first is generally collectible.
The
most-prized first
printings of the psychedelic posters have only
recently edged into trophy
collectible territory. “The visual jewels of
the psychedelic era are into five
figures now,” explains Howard Kramer,
the curatorial director of the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in
Cleveland, which has a large collection of
concert posters on
display.
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