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| Passion Investments: Art |
It's Not Only Rock 'n' Roll
Richard John Pietschmann
10/01/2005
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There was much agonized gnashing of teeth among veteran concert poster
collectors last December, when one of six known advertising posters
from the
Beatles’ 1966 Shea Stadium appearance in New York sold on the
auction website
ItsOnlyRocknRoll.com for a stunning
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| THE BEATLES' 1966 Shea Stadium poster broke the sales record for
a concert
poster when it was auctioned at ItsOnlyRocknRoll.com for $132,736.52 last
December. | $132,736.52. The sale, to
Minneapolis
precious metals dealer Jim Cook, not only set a record
price by a factor of two,
but also marked the first time any concert
poster had fetched six figures. “My
fellow collectors and I did a lot
of groaning,” laments Pete Howard, the owner
and publisher of the music
enthusiast magazine ICE in Santa Monica, Calif.
Howard has been a
serious poster collector for 17 years and values his
collection at
about a half-million dollars. “We all had stories of passing on
that
poster a decade ago for anywhere from $2,500 to $12,500.”
One of
Howard’s collector friends, however, was crowing. Just months earlier,
Mitch
Diamond, a devotee in Medford, Mass., had bought the same Beatles
poster on the
same auction site. His purchase price of $69,736—the most
ever paid up to that
date—had shocked the small community of committed
collectors. “We all thought he
was out of his mind,” Howard
admits.
Diamond, who says that his assemblage of
more than 1,000
concert posters has a market value of between $800,000 and $1
million,
trusted instincts honed by 25 years of collecting. “I felt in my gut
that this was the King Kong of concert posters, and no matter what it
cost now,
it was going to cost more in the future,” he says. “I think
[my auction price]
awakened people to the idea that concert posters
have a long way to go [on the
upside], and that the best of the best
are worth the best-of-the-best
prices.”
Veteran concert poster collectors have reason to regard
recent developments in their avocation with both satisfaction and
trepidation.
“It’s a two-edged sword,” says Joe Armstrong, a collector
based in Monarch
Beach, Calif, who owns more than 2,000 concert
posters. “If you’re into it
already, it has made your collection
extremely valuable. On the other hand, it’s
made concert posters
expensive and extremely hard to get for people who really
love
them.”
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