This October, Sotheby’s will auction one of rock history’s most recognizable instruments: Eddie Van Halen’s custom-built 1982 Kramer guitar. Estimated at $2 million–$3 million, the instrument will headline the firm’s inaugural “Grails Week” in New York, a new sales series aimed at positioning Sotheby’s at the center of the pop-culture collectibles boom.
The guitar is more than memorabilia. It accompanied the guitarist on stage in Philadelphia, Caracas, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires. After years of heavy use, it was gifted to Van Halen’s guitar technician, who later sold it to Mötley Crüe’s Mick Mars. Mars recorded parts of the band’s 1989 album Dr. Feelgood on the guitar before retiring it from view. The instrument has not been seen publicly in more than 40 years.
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Visually, the guitar is almost as striking as the sounds it produced. Spray-painted in Van Halen’s trademark red, black, and white abstract stripes, it was a refinement of his famous “Frankenstein” design—a mash-up of Fender and Gibson parts that helped him develop the so-called “brown sound.” Van Halen’s compulsive tinkering with fret heights, nut widths and body contours turned it into a piece of functional design as well as a concert tool.
The auction forms the centerpiece of Sotheby’s new Grails Week, a biannual series focused on cultural trophies drawn from music, film, television and comics. The event will also feature Bob Dylan’s original working lyrics for Subterranean Homesick Blues, the Rolling Stones’s original It’s Only Rock ’n Roll album cover artwork, and a Beatles cymbal used in 1960s studio sessions.
Such sales are a strategy. Fine art auctions have been flagging: in the first half of 2025, sales at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips fell 44 percent compared with the same period in 2022, according to ArtTactic. That contraction, roughly $3 billion in value, has forced auction houses to lean harder on luxury and pop culture categories. Last month in Paris, a battered Hermès Birkin bag once owned by Jane Birkin set a $10 million auction record for a handbag. Christie’s reported flat results for the first half of 2025 only because of a 30 percent surge in luxury sales, which reached $468 million and made up 22 percent of its total turnover. ArtTactic estimates that luxury goods now account for more than a fifth of sales by value at the major houses—a record share.
For Sotheby’s, which created a Popular Culture department earlier this year, Grails Week is designed to cement its presence in this expanding niche. “Exactly the kind of piece we had in mind,” is how Sotheby’s head of luxury Joshua Pullan described the Van Halen guitar. The house has already sold Ferris Bueller’s sweater vest and other cinematic detritus to considerable fanfare.