The word "provenance" in the art and antiques world refers to the prior ownership of any painting, objet d'art, antique or automobile and as the previously shuttered elite auction world has become readily accessible to the public via the internet, the provenance factor is looming increasingly large as a key determinant of the price of rare and storied auction pieces.
The astonishing rise of the internet over the last two decades has democratized the auction process, enabling an informed international audience to attend almost any auction. The characteristics of this new and much larger audience has changed the weighting of the most valuable "provenance" to include movie stars, music legends and pop culture figures.Prior to the coming of the internet, the most sought-after and hence valuable provenance for an objet d'art usually involved royalty or respected public figures with well-known good taste. These people played the role of "taste meister" in validating an object's significance and desirability.
On October 1, 1970, Janis Joplin recorded what was to be her best remembered song, the anti-consumerism anthem Mercedes-Benz. Three days later she died of a heroin overdose. The words of that song are even more poignant when you consider that the highly original artist did in fact own a Porsche and made it a personal trademark, driving the streets of Height-Ashbury in her psychedelic 356 Cabriolet.
The Porsche 356 was the first car that Porsche made, and the car that made the Porsche brandname a household word synonymous with sporting excellence and unfailing reliability. Tales of Porsche 356s traveling more than a million miles without major work are commonplace – no other sports car in history can boast such resilience. Produced over 18 years from 1948 to 1966, 76,313 Porsche 356s were made, with the last two years of production running in parallel with the then new 911, both cars becoming (somewhat ironically) the defacto "badge of success" for so many people who were raised listening to Joplin's music.
These days the 356 which sold for around $4000 during the fifties, has long since passed into collectible car status and although only half the 76,300 original cars are believed to have survived, that's still a remarkably large number for a car that is beginning to regularly fetch $200,000+ at auction.
If the Porsche 356 to be auctioned were an example of non-remarkable provenance, it would probably sell for somewhere between $100,000 and $130,000, but being the personal car of Janis Joplin, the "Queen of Psychedelic Soul", and painted with the Joplin-commissioned psychedelic paint scheme, it's potential is now upward of five to 20 times that figure, and even that might be underestimating things.
For example, a not dissimilar car in many ways is John Lennon's Rolls-Royce Phantom V, pictured above, which was also painted in psychedelic livery by a much-loved eccentric and creative genius. Like Lennon, Joplin died before her time, another characteristic which drives memorabilia prices skyward. Joplin died of a heroin overdose at just 27 years of age, while Lennon was assassinated in 1980 at age 40.
Janis Joplin was a highly original talent with one of the most recognizable female voices of all time. There's not a lot of genuine Joplin memorabilia out there, and she was deeply loved by her fans. This was HER car and she could be seen regularly driving it around her adopted hometown, the Height-Ashbury district of San Francisco, at a special point in time when it was the global epicentre of the peace-love movement.
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