The hand-embellished giclée print sold for £32,000 ($38,077), setting an auction record for the singer’s visual artwork. So this piece of work we’ve done here, if people hear it, I want them to hear it the way we made it sound.”īob Dylan, Side Tracks,, Oklahoma City (1979). It’s that far removed from what you actually see when you see a painting. “But an MP3 is the sonic equivalent of a Xerox of a Polaroid of a photograph of a painting. “I think this is the best record I’ve ever made in my life, so I want everybody to hear it,” Burnett told Variety. But there will be strict safeguards to ensure it isn’t recorded or disseminated online. He also expects it may one day wind up at a museum-maybe even the new Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa.
Its sale came just two days before the 60th anniversary of the original recording, which was part of Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.īurnett hopes the new owner “will consider it and care for it as a painting or any other singular work of art,” he told Christie’s.
“With Bob Dylan’s new version of ‘Blowin’ In The Wind,’ our first Ionic Original archival analogue disc, we have entered and aim to help develop a music space in the fine arts market.”Īuctioneer Arlene Blankers, Christie’s business manager decorative arts, auctioning the unique Bob Dylan record. “Marshall McLuhan said that a medium surrounds a previous medium and turns the previous medium into an art form, as film did with novels, as television did with film, as the internet has done with television, and as digital has done with analogue,” Burnett said in a statement. This painting, however, has the additional quality of containing that music, which can be heard by putting a stylus into the spiral and spinning it.”Īdding to the record’s status as an art object, it comes in a handmade walnut and rift sawn white oak cabinet designed and fabricated by Lawrence Azerrad, LADdesign, Inc. It is lacquer painted onto an aluminum disc, with a spiral etched into it by music. “Not only is an Ionic Original the equivalent of a painting, it is a painting. The unique recordings offer “the pinnacle of recorded sound,” Burnett said in a statement. Producer Joseph Henry “T-Bone” Burnett with a NeoFidelity Ionic Original acetate disc of a 2021 Bob Dylan recording of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Photo: Jason Myers, courtesy of Christie’s London. (Fabrication is expensive, but the plan is to eventually offer limited edition runs.) “This new hybrid technology yields the ‘holy grail’ for recording artists and audiophiles: a single format that can offer superior sound reproduction, foreign particle resistance, durability, excellent signal-to-noise ratio, longevity, portability, and compatibility with existing playback equipment,” the Christie’s lot essay boasted.īurnett’s new company, NeoFidelity, Inc., aims to market Ionic Original recordings as something akin to works of art. (The pharmaceutical executive was later convicted of securities fraud and the the government seized the album and sold it for $4 million to the cryptocurrency collective PleasrDAO.)Ī NeoFidelity Ionic Original acetate disc of a 2021 Bob Dylan recording of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Photo courtesy of Christie’s London.īut Ionic Originals employ a special sapphire and quartz gradient coating-the same technology that shields the International Space Station from the sun’s rays-that at once protects the physical record and improves playback, eliminating friction and providing a resonance and sonic fidelity that Burnett claims simply can’t be achieved in existing audio formats. The project is different than the Wu Tang Clan’s infamous Once Upon a Time in Shaolin album, the sole copy of which sold for $2 million on Paddle 8 to Martin Shkreli in 2015. “Sixty years after Bob first wrote and recorded ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, he is giving us a new recording of his song one that is both deeply relevant for our times and resonant with decades of the artist’s life and experience,” Burnett said in a statement. Burnett has developed a new analog audio format, which he’s dubbed Ionic Originals, and the unique Dylan single is the first one ever made. The song was recorded with producer Joseph Henry “T-Bone” Burnett, who played electric guitar and piano on Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour in the mid-1970s.
Bob Dylan just sold a new one-of-a-kind recording of his hit single “ Blowin’ in the Wind” for £1.48 million ($1.77 million) at Christie’s London.