After our item ran that blue-chip artist Raymond Pettibon — whose paintings have fetched as much as $3.4 million at auction — was recently celebrated by Sotheby’s in Beverly Hills, numerous notable readers reached out to tell us they own Pettibon works that were bought decades ago for just a few hundred bucks!
Ankler columnist Richard Rushfield and screenwriters Nicole Coady and Halle Eaton got in on the Pettibon action early and are now sitting on potential goldmines. (Pettibon famously began his career amid the ’80s LA hardcore punk scene by creating edgy album covers and fliers for bands on SST Records. The pioneering indie label was owned and operated by Pettibon’s brother and famed Black Flag founder, Greg Ginn.)
Back in the early ’90s, Rushfield, Coady and Eaton were all among a group of fledgling industry-ites who hung out a bar on Beverly Boulevard, called Dominick’s, the famed watering hole once frequented by Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack that ultimately closed in 2016.
At the time, Pettibon himself was a relative unknown outside of punk circles where his album covers for Black Flag and Sonic Youth were instantly recognizable.
A then-twentysomething named Mindy Daluiso was also part of the Dominick’s scene, and had begun dabbling as an art dealer. Her first client was Pettibon.
“Mindy asked all of us to buy [his] paintings to help her fledging business get off the ground,” Rushfield recalls. “And they were $300, $400, which was all any of us could have afforded back then.”
Adds Eaton, who also bought one of the artist’s works: “She had a huge collection of Pettibons. She spread them out all over the floor for us.”
Rushfield, a onetime art history major at Hampshire College, bought an eerie cityscape for $300,” he says. Coady splurged and shelled out $573, to be exact, for a painting called “The Other Side of Head.” (MoMA has a DIY art book in its collection by Pettibon and his nephew and sometimes collaborator, Nelson Tarpenny, with an image of the same Pettibon work on its cover.)
“I fell in love with this piece,” says Coady. “But I had no money at the time. I like scraped up all my pennies, and I got it.”
Soon after, Daluiso married and left America, Rushfield recalls. Then again, it was all a bit hazy for the members of the group. (We could not find Daluiso, but perhaps she, too is a Page Six Hollywood reader and will surface!)
In 1995, Pettibon joined the then-two-year-old Soho gallery of David Zwirner, who became the mega-dealer of art icons including Yayoi Kusama, Richard Serra, Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman, Dan Flavin and countless others.
Years later, Rushfield happened upon a coffee table book of Pettibon’s art. Gracing the book’s cover was a long fold-out picture of his studio. His cityscape appeared to be hanging on the wall of the studio in the photograph.
But the Ankler newsletter founder then quickly forgot about the potential value of a Pettibon — until he saw our piece — while turning his own attention to chronicling Hollywood’s churn of, er, fine art from “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel” to “Megalopolis.” (More recently, we’d written how the journo ruffled Paramount’s feathers by showing up at CinemaCon in possession of some “Block the Merger” buttons.)
Rushfield quips of his Pettibon purchase: “It’s the only smart investment I ever made.”
Or as Coady notes: “It definitely beats the stock market.”
