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And Finally Artist News
Kurt Cobain’s cardigan sells for over $330,000
By Andy Malt | Published on Monday 28 October 2019
The cardigan Kurt Cobain wore for Nirvana’s ‘MTV Unplugged’ performance has sold at auction for $334,000. That’s almost two and a half times the price it reached last time it sold just four years ago. And despite its most recent owner saying that owning it was just too stressful.
The stained, unwashed, cigarette burned cardigan had been given a top estimated price of $300,000. Darren Julien, CEO of auction house Julien’s Auctions, described it as “the holy grail of any article of clothing that [Cobain] ever wore”. I don’t know, what about his Flipper t-shirt? Although things didn’t go so well last time someone tried to capitalise on that.
Before the cardigan auction last week, its now former owner Garrett Kletjian warned in an interview with Rolling Stone that he’d found the responsibility of owning the garment overwhelming – hence his decision to sell the item he bought in 2015 for $137,500.
While it seemed like he was trying to warn people off from bidding, looking back it does now seem like a clever trick to build a bit of extra mystique into the cardigan’s story. He’s certainly been well-compensated for going to the trouble of keeping a thing in a safe for a few years.
It’s not known who the new owner is. We’ll have to wait and see how long they can keep hold of it before it all gets too much.
