BID FOR THE STARS

The booming market in the stuff of celebrity.

- RACHEL MONROE

The sidewalks of Lower Broadway in downtown Nashville are filled with people moving among neon-lit venues owned by celebrity musicians: Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk & Rock ‘n’ Roll Steakhouse, Jason Aldean’s Kitchen & Rooftop Bar, Miranda Lambert’s Casa Rosa. The Hard Rock Café, which opened in 1994, when the neighborhood could still reasonably be called eclectic, sits at the far edge of the strip, overlooking the Cumberland River. One evening last November, Julien’s Auctions took over a private room at the restaurant for a three-day sale in honor of the company’s twentieth anniversary. There was a spotlighted stage full of objects that musicians had worn or touched or played: a scratched amber ring that Janis Joplin wore onstage at the Monterey Pop Festival, in 1967; Prince’s gold snakeskin-print suit, small enough to fit on an adolescent-size mannequin; ripped jeans that had belonged to Kurt Cobain.

In the past year, the fine-art market has cooled, owing to uncertainty about the economy, but prices for celebrity-adjacent objects keep going up. A few weeks before the Julien’s event, Sotheby’s had auctioned off Freddie Mercury’s estate, drawing the most bidders the house had seen in two decades. “There was zero rationality to the valuations,” Chase McCue, the director of memorabilia at Hard Rock International, told me. “His mustache comb went for almost two hundred thousand.” The sale brought in more than fifteen million dollars, nearly quadruple the high estimate.