The Daily Swarm

Slick Rick’s Eye Patch:
Phillips de Pury’s Music Auction:

Phillips de Pury is an esteemed auction house dating back to 1796. Its clientele includes Marie Antoinette, Beau Brummell and Napoleon. A different ilk of bidders, however, will be raising their paddles this Saturday as the firm holds its inaugural Music sale.

The auction’s 231 lots are a constellation of music-inspired contemporary art, design, jewelry, photography and memorabilia….The best work smashes the mold: a self-portrait in blood by the notoriously self-destructive musician Pete Doherty (formerly of the Libertines and Kate Moss), distressed gauzy prints by Riceboy Sleeps (a Sigur Rós-associated duo) and a rhinestone painting of Donna Summer by Mickalene Thomas. Elsewhere, iconoclastic images like Shi Xinning’s imagined meeting between the Beatles and Mao and a silk-screen print of the Rolling Stones clad in female Elizabethan garb by Jesus Diaz De Vivar turn the rock star-worshiping on its bloated head.

Fashion is briefly represented by a Technicolor couture dress by Bernhard Willhelm that Björk wore on her Volta tour and by one of Bob Dylan’s fringed leather jackets. Best of all, though, is the diamond-encrusted eye patch commissioned for the bling-loving rapper Slick Rick.

So, now that uptown auction houses are packaging and selling rock ‘n’ roll’s rebellious spirit, is it finally time to write the genre’s epitaph? If CBGB is a John Varvatos store, Bono gives a shout-out to BlackBerry from the stage, and our president listens to Dylan on his iPod, how rock ‘n’ roll is rock ‘n’ roll? Neil Young’s 1979 proclamation that “rock and roll can never die” may, in some form, be true, but these days it’s being sold to the highest bidder.