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9 CASH CHOOSES SOTHEBY’S NO Almost a year to the day after Johnny Cash died, Sotheby’s held an auction for his estate, an elaborate affair that featured not only the sale of Cash and Carter’s possessions but also an accompanying exhibit. Cash was not the first celebrity to have his materials auctioned off at Sotheby’s, the most famous perhaps being Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in 1996, whose sale became a national story.1 Unlike Jackie O, however, whose son and daughter arranged for her auction after she passed away, Johnny and June Carter Cash had planned to hold theirs before they died, hoping to sell off a lifetime of shopping and accumulation of artifacts of many kinds. Their son, John Carter Cash, said preparations had not progressed very far before they died, suggesting that an additional reason for the auction was Cash’s grief about losing Carter: “He seemed determined to remove from the house everything that reminded him of her, though he would barely begin the process before he passed.”2 Still, the choice to auction off his materials was easy—Cash and Carter had accumulated an enormous amount of material and selling it would benefit the estate. Cash likely chose Sotheby’s because of its prominence. That it was in New York, was not a problem as he and Carter visited their daughter, Rosanne Cash, there quite often, and they liked frequenting old bookstores and antique shops. Although New York seems vast, in actual distance , many of Cash’s familiar places in the city were close to one another. His favorite hotel in New York, the Plaza Athenee near Central Park, was less than a mile from Sotheby’s, which itself is only a few miles from the East Village, where I took the photographs of Cash T-shirts. It’s not far either from the New York headquarters of Sony, the parent company of Columbia, where Cash recorded for almost thirty years, nor from the Ed Sullivan Theater, where Cash performed on its namesake 228 ✭ NINE CHOICES ✭ show in the 1960s and on the David Letterman show some thirty years later. Sotheby’s is close to Carnegie Hall, where Cash played a few times. And the Upper East Side, long called the “silk stocking” district, known for its wealth and prestige, is also home to an entertainment and business world that artists encounter all the time.3 New York revels in its culture, but it also remains the financial capital of the world, and only Los Angeles rivals its nexus of finance, culture, and media. In particular, Sotheby’s, Letterman, Sony, and the East Village shops all helped negotiate the transactional relationship between Cash and his audience, though their commodities vary widely: Letterman and the record companies essentially sell experience; Sotheby’s and the East Village sell affiliation. When we watch Letterman, we see a performance similar to what we hear when we buy an album (though authenticants like Rob in High Fidelity often fetishize the physical album as much as the performance). Buying a T-shirt at a souvenir shop and wearing it shows an audience that the wearer feels some connection to the artist displayed, though the reasons for such feelings differ. The Sotheby’s auction had similar emotional roots, though on a much grander scale—purchasers would be buying a more intimate idea of affiliation. In his book about Sotheby’s, Robert Lacey suggests that identity is somehow consonant with ownership: “It is the assumption of most people today that they can be defined by their material possessions . Fine things display a fine person.”4 For Cash’s fans, the fine things that he put up for auction would be relatively unremarkable had Cash not owned them. The exhibit at the auction displayed artifacts of importance —Cash’s guitar, Mother Maybelle’s guitar, gold records, a Grammy —juxtaposed with items that were specifically Cash-oriented, as well more everyday items; in fact, the exhibit was a lot like the House of Cash in the “Hurt” video. The arrangement of the auction lots was eclectic— awards mixed with canceled checks; turquoise dresses and lavender hats; black suits of different styles; two busts of Cash and one of June Carter and John Carter Cash; three full rooms of furniture, including a beautiful four-poster bed; a glass case containing twenty harmonicas; photographs; a Remington statue; and part of a display from the House of Cash museum. “Hurt” played on a television set in...

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