Christie's held an auction of punk memorabilia on Monday.
Vivienne Westwood bondage pants, photographs of Lou Reed and Blondie, badges for the Buzzcocks and concert fliers from clubs like Max’s Kansas City went up for bid at the decidedly nonpunk hour of 10 a.m. Estimates were as high as $1,500 for an original “God Save the Queen” Sex Pistols T-shirt and $7,000 for an autographed Ramones test album from 1976.
“We’ve sold punk material before — a T-shirt here, a poster there,” said Simeon Lipman, the head of Christie’s pop culture department, at a preview the day before the sale. “This time around I wanted to explore the punk aesthetic. I love the music, and the memorabilia itself is very, very scarce. It has such a wonderful look to it. It’s very visceral.”
That’s certainly one way to describe a used hard-core T-shirt. The timing was fortunate: the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex opened on Tuesday in SoHo, with an exhibition about the Clash and with the CBGB urinal under plexiglass. But with the economy crashing, would anyone really pay thousands of dollars for Black Flag fliers? Mr. Lipman thought so.
“A lot of this material is not investment-potential driven,” he said. “For people in their 30s and 40s, these were their heroes and antiheroes. People have an emotional response to it because they were there, or they wish they were there. Or because they think, ‘That would look great in my living room.’ That sometimes bucks trends.”