Admit One - How a Chance Encounter in Soho Turned Concert Ticket Stubs into Art

One day in July 2024, while walking home from the Angelika Theater, I passed a home décor store called clic (deliberately lowercase) on Centre Street in Soho. It’s a chic place—beautiful objects, beautifully displayed. But what instantly grabbed my eye was a wall in the corner lined with artwork I had never quite seen treated as artwork before: enlarged, exquisitely framed concert ticket stubs.

From clic's website.

As a lifelong rock-and-roll fanatic, I was mesmerized. Posters? Sure. Album covers? Obviously. But ticket stubs? I’d never thought of them that way. And that’s surprising, considering I come from a generation that never imagined tickets would one day arrive by email or live eternally on a smartphone. I saved nearly all of mine—not as “art,” but as mementos, tiny little mental diary entries, capable of whisking me back to a long-gone night of music and chaos.

A salesperson named Justin saw me staring and came over. Many of the framed stubs showed bands who I’d seen live in concert (Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Kinks), while others made me weak with envy — The Beatles, Queen, The Sex Pistols, The Doors, Creedence Clearwater Revival. There was even a full three-day Woodstock ticket, perforations intact. As I stood there in awe, Justin told me about the artist behind the project: Blaise Hayward, based right here in New York City.

I gave Justin my contact info and asked him to pass it along. A week or two later, Blaise emailed and asked me to call. We chatted; I offered to show him my tickets and lend him anything he thought might fit the project. At the bottom of his email was a link to his website. One click revealed that this was no hobbyist—Blaise is a serious photographer and sculptor. A true artist.

A few days later, I visited his studio apartment in Gramercy. He and I are of the same generation, and with shared passions for photography and music, we hit it off immediately. He showed me some of his other work, and we talked about how younger generations don’t have the same emotional connection to physical tickets; everything now is a QR code. The romance is gone.

When I pulled out my binder of stubs, Blaise was visibly impressed.

My book of ticket stubs

He selected a dozen or so—The Kinks, Elvis Costello, The Ramones, The Who, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, The Rolling Stones, among others—and asked to borrow them. He warned that the project might take months or even years, but not to worry: they’d be safe. He also told me he couldn’t pay for them, which caught me off guard only because the thought never crossed my mind. I assured him that compensation was irrelevant. I was thrilled at the possibility of one of my own stubs becoming part of this evolving body of work.

Over the following months, we exchanged occasional texts. In November 2025, he invited me back to show me the project’s progress, including this very cool twist: Rizzoli agreed to publish a book of the series! Blaise showed me several prints, and they were astonishing in their detail. I marveled at how three-dimensional they looked. He told me the secret behind the subtle three-dimensionality: he rests each stub on some nickels before photographing it, creating a gentle shadow that lifts the ticket off the page. Simple, brilliant.

Blaise puts my original stub below his photographic version, to show how precisely the colors match

My Ramones stub. Look how three dimensional it looks

The upcoming book will feature one hundred stubs. Choosing which ones are going to make the cut is bound to be agonizing. Do you go by visual appeal—color, typography, layout?

My most colorful stub

Or by cultural importance—Beatles, Stones, Hendrix? The Woodstock tickets aren’t pretty, but they’re Woodstock, for heaven’s sake.

Tickets for all three days of Woodstock. The perforations are still intact!

How do you leave them out? Blaise made no promises about whether any of mine would make the final cut, though he admitted a fondness for my Ramones stub—plain green, creased, torn, typeset in a non-descript font that simply says, “The Ritz present The Ramones”. It fits the punk ethos to a tee.

I had also given him a few pristine tickets—an Elvis Costello and a Kinks stub from SUNY Binghamton—both uncreased and untorn because I’d snagged them through the student concert commission. I assumed their immaculate condition might make them more desirable. Blaise politely corrected that assumption. He values the creases, tears, and wear—the evidence of a fabulous evening, a life fully lived. Ticket stubs aren’t like uncirculated coins. They’re artifacts. The patina, the imperfections, they’re part of the point.

My un-creased, un-torn Kinks ticket. No, thanks.

Why Ticket Stubs Never Got Their Due

It’s funny—concert posters and album covers were canonized long ago, yet ticket stubs never got invited to the party. I think there are a few reasons.

1. Their size. A ticket stub fits in your palm. It’s meant to sit in a wallet, not on a wall. Posters were designed to grab your attention from a street corner; album covers to seduce you from across a record store. Tickets were designed to be used and then disappear. Also, we’re conditioned to equate size with significance. We think art must demand physical space. It’s not the two-inch painting that grabs your attention at the museum. It’s the giant canvas that catches your eye first. It goes against our instincts to call something art if you could accidentally toss it out with your gum wrapper. Ironically, that smallness is what makes them so compelling when enlarged.

From my stub collection. I saw both the early and late shows. Tickets were a whopping $5.50, but as a student, I only had to pay $4.00

2. Function over form. Posters announced an upcoming show. Album covers broadcast a band’s identity. Ticket stubs were receipts. They gave you your row and seat number and maybe a rain disclaimer. They weren’t illustrated by Milton Glaser or Rick Griffin, or photographed by Annie Leibovitz or Andy Warhol. They were cranked out by a venue’s ticketing office using whatever generic typeface came standard on the machine.

This Clash show, which I attended, is the concert where the iconic photo of Paul Simonon throttling his bass guitar was taken.

3. They became meaningful only after the fact. Posters and album art were designed to be aesthetically pleasing in the moment. Ticket stubs become beautiful retroactively. You went to the show, and it became part of your personal mythology. The stub is the talisman that survives.

At this Jesus and Mary Chain show, the opening band were some guys called Nine Inch Nails. I wonder whatever happened to them.

4. Ticket stubs are personal.

A poster is designed for everyone. A ticket stub is for you. When I see my stub from The Who at Madison Square Garden in 1979, it’s not just a little rectangle of paper. It’s the four-hour drive from Binghamton, the first show after Keith Moon’s death, the exhilaration of staggering out onto Seventh Avenue past midnight to drive back for morning classes. That’s not art in the formal sense—it’s art in the emotional sense.

The stub for the first Who concert where Kenney Jones replaced Keith Moon. Enlarged, photographed, and immortalized by Blaise.

The Accidental Art of It All

That’s the appeal of Blaise’s project: he treats the stub as accidental art—objects whose aesthetics weren’t planned but emerged over time. The faded ink, the torn perforation, the creased corner, the show date and venue that instantly transports you back into your younger self.

When a competing club told the fire marshals that the Bond was overselling tickets and cramming too many people into the club, The Clash made sure that all their fans got to see them perform, by agreeing to play 18 nights in a row. I was lucky to catch one of those shows.

Enlarged, these tiny scraps stop being ephemera. They become monuments. Suddenly you can see every typeface decision, every dot of the color pattern, every mark of handling. The stub transforms into a personal poster. A personal one—half mass-produced artifact, half private reliquary.

Blaise isn’t just photographing tickets; he’s photographing history, and turning nostalgia into art, and in doing so, he’s reminding all of us who grew up clutching a piece of paper as we sprinted to our seats that ticket stubs were never “just receipts.” They were art all along.We just needed someone to make them big enough to see. Thanks, Blaise.