Nirvana's unplugged play at MTV was important to me personally - at that time a toddler dad in a newly built Södra station and a career path. I gave the CD the highest rating - six dice dots, "classic" - in my review in the Entertainment Guide and I still stand for it today. That plate, with its uncanny plump sound and all its obvious flaws, is truly classic: a bearing, significant stone in a large collective sense-building. With exquisitely chosen cover numbers, Nirvana is involved in a living, extensive root system: Leadbelly's blood-soaked Where did you sleep last night; David Bowie's Playing Tragic The Man Who Sold the World.
On Saturday, the gray acrylic cardigan Cobain berries were sold at the auction in New York for $ 334,000 - about SEK 3.25 million. Julien's auction house specializes in "the exciting world of celebrities and their collections", the exciting world of famous people and their movable property.
Commodification is one of Karl Marx's most exciting and fruitful concepts - and one of the Marxist concepts that has gained relevance even for those who are not Marxist in the left-wing political sense. Commodification is a concern not least for the conservative mind: the transformation of everything important into a commodity.
What Karl Marx saw as early as the mid-1800s, when the development was driven by steam and colonialism, was something that became evident to each and every one now in the era of the 5G revolution, the adventure trade. Namely, the astonishing ability of capitalism to turn human emotions, aspirations, relationships and values into marketable products. That is the real alchemy of the market: Wahrenfetischismus in Marx's German, commodity fetishism.
Inner feelings can be packaged and sold back to those who housed them.
In the mass market, Kurt Cobain sells 25 years after his unfortunate death t-shirts and small items with his beautiful Christ face on.
In the luxury market, his still-alive expression - his voice, his desire to rise out of Aberdeen, Washington, and turn into something wonderful - sells an unwashed acrylic cardigan for 3.25 million.
An auction record, by the way: the highest price ever clubbed for a cardigan, writes the auction house with contented irony.