Output details
24 - Anthropology and Development Studies
Goldsmiths' College
Sounds like a vintage guitar: a documentary about old guitars
In this film, the vintage electric guitar is approached as a ‘contemporary relic’, a modern musical instrument which is also ‘traditional’. The veneration of the ‘modern past’ extends to the counterfeiting of vintage instruments artfully distressed to replicate instruments which are actually little older than their most devoted collectors.
The transformation of instruments not long ago regarded as exemplars of mass culture into high-end (Sotheby’s, Bonhams) collectables provides an opportunity to chart movements within and between different taste cultures as well as the co-existence of traditions of artisanship and technologically advanced equipment manufacture. Sub-domains of esoteric forms of connoisseurship and taste cultures express international, national, and regional/micro-regional tendencies not part of official histories (of instrument manufacture, for example) or larger narratives of cultural capital.
London’s Denmark Street has long served as a focal point for the popular music industry, first in terms of music publishers and with the pop boom of the 1960s, later as a retailing site and repair centre. Within the Street’s workshops the cultivation of the electric guitar as both a symbol and a working instrument is realized in terms of trendsetting and reaction to external influences (the rise of Eastern production of high quality instruments, for instance). The film, through observation and interviews, focuses on artisans, collectors and sellers for whom an interest in guitars and their history is both livelihood and subject of obsessive interest.
The fabrication of cod-authenticity through faux vintage instruments achieves a replicant virtue: many of the desired instruments are so rare as to make ownership unrealistic (a well-preserved vintage instrument with sound provenance could attract a price of well of £100,000), and as a consequence, the fakery of a faux vintage instrument may be regarded as achievement rather than defect.
