Johnny Marr is parting with roughly 80 guitars through Christie's London, each one carrying specific biographical weight: the guitars on which The Smiths were written, the instruments of a particular post-punk sensibility. At the same time, Berry Campbell gallery is staging a show dedicated to Perle Fine, a founding figure of Abstract Expressionism who spent decades professionally invisible while her male contemporaries became the canon. Both stories are about how the market decides what gets preserved.
The Archive as a Power Structure
Marr's guitars are going to auction precisely because they are already storied. The provenance is legible, the biography is documented, the cultural weight is pre-certified. Christie's is not discovering Marr. It is monetizing a consensus. Perle Fine's situation was the inverse: the critical consensus that formed around Abstract Expressionism in the postwar decades was explicitly gendered. She was present at the same openings, in the same conversations, making work of equivalent ambition, and the market routed around her. The Berry Campbell show, titled after the essay collection that first named the women of that generation, is archival rescue work. It is not neutral either: the gallery is a commercial space, and the retrospective attention now has a price tag attached. The Counterpublic Triennial, currently running across St. Louis as a sprawling public art intervention, represents the alternative logic: art that refuses to route its value through auction house consensus, placed in public space, appraised by presence rather than provenance.
What the Canon Actually Costs
The Marr auction and the Fine retrospective are not opposites. They are two moments in the same system. Objects that enter the auction apparatus gain a certain kind of permanent legibility: the price becomes the record, the hammer becomes the archive. Objects that don't enter it, or that enter it late, remain vulnerable to being re-forgotten. A 2025 paper in Poetics by Giuffre on cultural gatekeeping found that retrospective canonization of previously excluded artists tends to absorb them into existing hierarchies rather than disrupting those hierarchies. Fine gets her show. The canon absorbs her. Marr's guitars get their gavel. The instruments of a mood become an asset class. The question neither event resolves: who is being left out of this week's auction that another generation will have to go looking for? ProblemChild Advisory's anti-gatekeeping platform is one answer to that question, and it's instructive that it has to exist at all.