[Dixielandjazz] The Collectors

[Stephen G Barbone]

Not specifically OKOM, however interesting article that provides some  
insight as to why
people collect musical memorabilia. Wow, Someday, Bill Haesler's  
washboard may be
worth a million dollars.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband


NY TIMES - March 8, 2011 - By John Tierney
Urge to Own That Clapton Guitar Is Contagious, Scientists Find

Why would someone pay $959,500 for a used guitar?

That was a difficult enough question in 2004 when Eric Clapton sold  
his beloved Fender Stratocaster named Blackie. But now, as collectors  
around the world prepare to bid Wednesday at another charity auction  
of Mr. Clapton’s guitars, the questions are even tougher.

Why would someone create a replica of Blackie, complete with every  
single nick and scratch, including the wear pattern from Mr. Clapton’s  
belt buckle and the burn mark from his cigarettes? And why is that  
replica expected to fetch at least $20,000 at Wednesday’s auction, and  
probably much more?

Fortunately, social scientists have been hard at work on the answers.  
After conducting experiments and interviewing guitar players and  
collectors, they have just published papers analyzing “celebrity  
contagion” and “imitative magic,” not to mention “a dynamic cyclical  
model of fetishization appropriate to an age of mass-production.”

One of their conclusions is that the seemingly illogical yearning for  
a Clapton relic, even a pseudorelic, stems from an instinct crucial to  
surviving disasters like the Black Death: the belief that certain  
properties are contagious, either in a good or a bad way. Another  
conclusion is that the magical thinking chronicled in “primitive”  
tribes will affect bids for the Clapton guitars being auctioned at  
Bonhams in Midtown Manhattan.

Some bidders might rationalize their purchases as good investments, or  
as objects that are worth having just because they provide pleasant  
memories and mental associations of someone they admire. But those do  
not seem to be the chief reasons for buying celebrity memorabilia,  
according to a team of psychologists at Yale.

The researchers asked people how much they would like to buy objects  
that had been owned by different celebrities, including popular ones  
like George Clooney and pariahs like Saddam Hussein. People’s  
affection for the celebrity did not predict how much value they  
assigned to the memorabilia — apparently they were not buying it  
primarily for the pleasant associations.

Nor were they chiefly motivated by the prospect of a profit, as the  
researchers discovered when they tested people’s eagerness to acquire  
a celebrity possession that could not be resold. That restriction made  
people less interested in items owned by villains, but it did not  
seriously dampen their enthusiasm for relics from their idols.

The most important factor seemed to be the degree of “celebrity  
contagion.” The Yale team found that a sweater owned by a popular  
celebrity became more valuable to people if they learned it had  
actually been worn by their idol. But if the sweater had subsequently  
been cleaned and sterilized, it seemed less valuable to the fans,  
apparently because the celebrity’s essence had somehow been removed.

“Our results suggest that physical contact with a celebrity boosts the  
value of an object, so people will pay extra for a guitar that Eric  
Clapton played, or even held in his hands,” said Paul Bloom, who did  
the experiments at Yale along with George E. Newman and Gil Diesendruck.

This sort of direct physical contact helps explains why the original  
Blackie guitar sold for nearly $1 million — Mr. Clapton had played it  
extensively for more than a decade. But why build an exact replica of  
the guitar and all its nicks and scratches?

The replica’s appeal is related to another form of thinking called the  
law of similarity, Dr. Newman said. That is a belief in what is also  
called imitative magic: things that resemble each other have similar  
powers.

“Cultural practices such as burning voodoo dolls to harm one’s enemies  
are consistent with a belief in the law of similarity,” Dr. Newman  
said. “An identical Clapton guitar replica with all of the dents and  
scratches may serve as such a close proxy to Clapton’s original guitar  
that it is in some way confused for the real thing. Of course, the  
replica is worth far less than the actual guitar that he played, but  
it still appears to be getting a significant amount of value for its  
similarity.”

Even a mass-produced replica guitar without the nicks and scratches  
can become magical, according to two other researchers, Karen V.  
Fernandez of the University of Auckland and John L. Lastovicka of  
Arizona State University. They interviewed veteran guitar collectors,  
including one who had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on  
replicas of Beatles gear.

These collectors did not go along with the notion — put forth  
previously in the academic literature — that a mass-produced object  
could never acquire the aura of a fetish, the anthropological term for  
an object believed to have supernatural powers. These guitar  
collectors insisted that even a factory-made replica of a famous  
musician’s guitar had a certain something that enabled them to play  
better music.

“Consumers use contagious and imitative magic to imbue replica  
instruments with power,” Dr. Fernandez and Dr. Lastovicka write in a  
forthcoming issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. “Semiotically  
signified magical thinking causes replicas to radiate aura and thus  
transforms them into fetishes.”

Of course, the collectors still preferred a beat-up guitar used by a  
star to a brand-new replica of it. One of them told the researchers  
how he had improved his own guitar-playing by using old guitar strings  
that had been discarded by Duane Allman. This belief in contagious  
magic may sound illogical, but it makes a certain evolutionary sense,  
Dr. Lastovicka said.

“Beliefs about contagion, and especially biological contagion, by our  
ancestors are one of the reasons why we are here today,” he said.  
“Those who did not stay away from those who died from the plague in  
the Dark Ages also died of the plague; those who died of the plague in  
the Dark Ages likely have few, if any, descendants today. So in our  
modern and scientific world, these manners of magical thinking still  
persist.”

The contagious powers of Eric Clapton seem to extend not only to the  
guitars he played but also to the amplifiers whose knobs he presumably  
touched. Dozens of them are on sale at the Wednesday auction, which  
benefits the Crossroads Centre, a treatment center for drug and  
alcohol addiction founded by Mr. Clapton.

In fact, one of the amps — a 1957 Fender Twin that Mr. Clapton used  
extensively in the studio and on stage — has been singled out as the  
“holy grail” of the auction by Guitar Aficionado, a magazine for  
collectors.

That assessment made perfect sense to Robert Ender, a guitar player  
from New Jersey who was checking out the wares at the auction house on  
Monday afternoon. He said he was planning to bid, although he  
suspected that the 1957 amp, like the replica of Blackie, would be  
beyond his price range.

“It would be so cool to have any of these amps or guitars,” he said.

Asked to explain the allure, Mr. Ender fell back on another word for  
magic. “Any connection with Eric,” he said, “adds some kind of musical  
mojo.”