Johnny Marr is auctioning off guitars he actually played—instruments that shaped The Smiths’ sound and later work with Billie Eilish—because his studio was at risk of becoming a museum. The stated enemy: his own legacy turning into a tourist attraction.
Let’s parse this. A musician who spent decades crafting songs that mattered is now selling the physical evidence of that work to prevent people from… looking at it. The guitars will go to collectors who will absolutely not display them in climate-controlled rooms while charging admission. They will simply own them privately, which is definitely different from a museum, except for the part where they own them and nobody sees them.
The real absurdity isn’t that Marr wants to preserve his studio as a working space rather than a pilgrimage site. It’s that we’ve reached a point where an artist’s tools are considered so culturally significant that their mere presence in a room transforms that room into a heritage site. A guitar is a guitar until a famous person plays it, at which point it becomes an artifact that must be curated, protected, and kept away from the sticky fingers of people who might actually want to experience music history.
Marr’s solution—liquidate the problem—is the most rock-and-roll response possible: destroy the shrine before it destroys the workspace. The irony is that selling these guitars to anonymous bidders probably ensures they’ll end up exactly where he didn’t want them: in a climate-controlled vault somewhere, owned by someone who treats them like investment property.
The guitars will fetch serious money. The studio will remain a studio. And somewhere, a hipster is already booking a flight to wherever they end up.