By: Guillermo F. Perez-Argüello

Guillermo F. Perez-Argüello — Sat, 05 Mar 2016 13:23:00 +0000

The amounts mentioned are not what each estate is worth but what it made last year. Historically and culturally, Elvis Presley’s legacy, basically through visits to his former home Graceland, which has been both included in the National Register of Historic Places and declared a US Landmark with over 650,000 paying visitors a year, will remain larger than that of any celebrity in the XXth century, not theoretically or just in terms of grosses for the beneficiaries of the Estate, but factually as a prime mover to the tourist industries of at leat two states of the Union, his image as mentioned by the writer of the article so valuable even outside the world of entertanment as to demand stratospherical prices in the Art world, as has been the case, for instance, in the first 15 years of the 21st century alone with several Elvis inspired Andy Warhol paintings, first with the sale of “Red Elvis” in February of 2000, which went privately, for US$2.9 million , followed by that of “Elvis 2 times”, sold at Christie’s in November of 2007 for US$15.7 million, “Double Elvis”, which went under the hammer at Sothebys in May of 2012 for US$37 million, then “Triple Elvis”, sold at Christies’s in November of 2014 for US$81.9 million and, the mother of all Elvis silkscreens, “Eight Elvises”, sold in December of 2008, privately, for US$100 million. As a comparison, the original Andy Warhol image of Michael Jackson, which TIME Magazine commissioned Warhol as a feature cover for one of their magazine’s editions in 1984, went for US$1 million in 2,010.

Comments on: Top Ten Highest Earning Dead Celebrities Estates

By: Guillermo F. Perez-Argüello