The 70s were hard on the singers of most pansexual ghoul-rock proto-metal bands, but none more so than Alice Cooper. It would be easy enough for any of us, in similar circumstances, to jam a rolled-up Andy Warhol print into a tube, put it in storage and forget about it while we were hospitalised for a drinking problem. So it has proved, with the news that the chicken-bothering singer unknowingly kept a rare Little Electric Chair silkscreen in his lockup for 40 years. The top price paid for one of those was $11.6m (£8.9m) in 2015.
His is not the only Swiss-cheesed mind to forget where he put a few million bucks. In 2014, 60 classic cars were found gathering dust on a farmyard in western France. They included a Talbot-Lago owned by Egypt’s profligate monarch King Farouk, and a Maserati Berlinetta that was one of three in the world. Chris Evans bought one of the lesser pieces – a Ferrari 250 GT Spyder – for £5.5m (just two-and-a-half years of his BBC salary). Roger Baillon, a French entrepreneur, had bought an even larger cache of motors in the 1970s, with dreams of making money from a world-beating motor museum. But he had overreached, his empire faltered and he was forced to sell off about 50 of the fleet. The rest rusted on the farm, until he, and then his son, died. Only when the grandchildren called in car appraisers did they discover the value of the collection.
And last month, in Scottsdale, Arizona, a man moving into a retirement home found, while cleaning out a closet, a signed LA Lakers basketball poster. A local auctioneer was brought in to assess it; he reckoned $300 for the poster, but thought the Jackson Pollock right behind it might be worth a few bob more. The owner’s half-sister, Jenifer Gordon Cosgriff, had been a Manhattan socialite and family black sheep, who had purchased the painting while rubbing shoulders with the abstract expressionist vanguard in 50s New York. The restoration could cost $50,000, but the painting could sell for $10m-$15m.
Of course, modern artists have paltry price tags. A painting found in a Toulouse loft in April last year was claimed to be a lost Caravaggio – the gory Judith Beheading Holofernes – and hence worth £94m. Its owners had been investigating a roof leak when they discovered the work, a level of serendipity that helped fuel fierce controversy in the art world over its authenticity.
We would all like to believe that some of our tat might be worth £1m. And, given that US reality hit Storage Wars once found some rose-coloured eyeglasses for chickens that turned out to be worth $500, a Caravaggio in the attic seems pretty everyday, frankly.
