Jim Irsay Hall Of Fame auction at Christie's obliterated all previous auction records for Music Memorabilia.
Last night the Jim Irsay Hall Of Fame auction at Christie's obliterated all previous auction records for Music Memorabilia. Selling for $14,550,000, David Gilmour’s Black Stratocaster guitar made a record price for a guitar and in fact became the most expensive item of Music Memorabilia ever sold, beating the previous record price achieved by Kurt Cobain’s MTV Unplugged guitar which sold for $6 Million in 2020. And that was only the start of it.
The auction witnessed a world record price for a set of drums (Ringo Starr’s Beatles kit, $2,393,000); a world record price for a concert poster (Buddy Holly “The Day The Music Died”, $457,200); a world record price for a piano (John Lennon’s Broadwood piano, $3,247,000); a world record price for a set of handwritten lyrics (Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are A Changin’”, $2,515,000)...I could go on, overall the auction smashed over 20 record prices and realized $87 Million in just 44 lots.
What is most interesting about this auction is that, unlike the majority of groundbreaking celebrity auctions in this area, prices were not driven up by the provenance of the collection. This was not a single-owner auction along the lines of The Ringo Starr Collection or The David Gilmour Collection, both of which smashed records in 2015 and 2019, where the direct celebrity provenance appeals to collectors. The Jim Irsay auction was a collection driven by a collector who purchased the best of the best at the top of the market, often paying well over auction estimates, driving and dominating the Music Memorabilia market for the last twenty years. Astoundingly, almost everything in the Hall of Fame auction exceeded the price that Jim Irsay had paid for it, in some cases even when the piece had only been purchased in very recent years, and dare I say it, proving the incredible investment potential in this area.
Key Facts
So what lessons do we learn from this? Last night’s auction ushered in a new generation of buyers in this ever-growing market who are not afraid to dig deep to acquire the most important artifacts from the history of music and popular culture. Are they also buying expensive fine art? Probably not. In the 1990s and early 2000s, during the nascent years of this new collecting category, music memorabilia was somewhat derided and seen as the poor relation to the booming contemporary art market. Over the last ten years, prices in this collecting area have continued to grow at a steady pace, with each new record-breaking sale feeling like it might be a high watermark. But the Jim Irsay auction has set the bar high again and I think we can safely say that this market is not going away any time soon. The Memorabilia market has reached ever more dizzying heights and is booming more than ever before. There are two more days to some of Jim Irsay auctions at Christie’s, we will be watching with bated breath. More to come...
The Irsay Collection — Return Attribution & Market Analysis