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.
She also understood that an auction could promote a living celebrity. “She said she’d rather put needles in her eyes than have a bad catalogue,” Nolan said. Specialists from Sotheby’s, which co-sponsored the sale, appraised the obviously high-value items—diamond jewelry, Bob Mackie gowns—while Julien kept an eye out for objects with more personal qualities, such as her dictionary and her high-school biology workbook.