Having failed to sell his collection on eBay for £5m, the son of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, Joe Corré, has begun destroying artefacts from the collection with the first to go coming in the form of an original acetate of Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy in the UK’ which was burned.
As Dazed reports, Corré had planned to sell the collection via eBay and give the money to charity. With the bidding having begun at £6,000, it reached £62,500 last week, but failed to hit its £1m reserve, and so Corré has decided to gradually burn the collection.
He says it’s a protest against the co-option of punk aesthetics by commercial interests and the establishment, citing various exhibitions by institutions turning punk into a ‘museum piece’ or ‘tribute act’. The collection’s remaining pieces will apparently be burned this Saturday (November 26).
