Sonic Youth's Album Art for Sale

Music fans for whom Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation is an all-time classic will get a chance next week to bid on the painting that served as album-cover art, the Independent reports. Kerze (Candle), a 1983 work by German Gerhard Richter, is one in a series of still lifes based on photographs, and could fetch more than $5 million at auction Wednesday.

One auctioneer told the Independent that the association with a classic rock album gives the 3-foot-square painting a special cachet with 40-something collectors. As for Richter, it's almost certain that the Dresden-born master had not heard of Sonic Youth before his work appeared on one of the "greatest album covers of all time." (More Sotheby's stories.)