Wednesday, March 09, 2011

Boogity boogity twang . . .

A 1948 Gibson guitar once played by Eric Clapton, being held by Alicia Scalera at the auction house Bonhams in New York. Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times

THE NYT ASKS, "Why would someone pay $959,500 for a used guitar?" Apparently, ol' Slowhand is parting with some choice equipment at auction. The market forces at work may be spurred by quirks of the psyche:

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.”

Bunch of raving nutters. A decade or so ago, I ran across this gem:

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