Phoebe Bridgers’ smashed guitar is up for auction
The sale has been organised by the GLAAD Media Awards.
Images: SNL / GLAAD via HandBid
The guitar that Phoebe Bridgers smashed on SNL is going up for auction in a sale organised by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) Media Awards.
Closing out her performance of I Know The End on Saturday Night Live, Bridgers swung her Danelectro against a monitor, taking a massive chunk out of the side. Photos provided by the auction page show the bridge, pickups and neck still relatively intact, although it’s not known whether the electronics still work.
At time of writing, the current bid for the guitar is $6,500. Bidding will close on 11 April 2021.
The GLAAD Media Awards honour TV, music, film, literature and journalism that displays an inclusive representation of members of the LGBTQ+ community, and the issues that affect their lives.
Bridgers herself was nominated for the Outstanding Breakthrough Music Artist award, alongside Orville Peck, Rina Sawayama, Trixie Mattel, Arca, FLETCHER, Keiynan Lonsdale, Kidd Kenn, Victoria Monét and Chika.
Bridgers smashing her guitar at the end of her performance incited a huge amount of debate in the following days, with some decrying it as staged and pointless, while others pointed out that male artists have been smashing guitars for decades under far less scrutiny.
David Crosby, when asked by a fan on Twitter to comment on the event, called the act “pathetic.” This prompted Bridgers herself to respond to Crosby’s comment, calling him a “little bitch.”
Commenting on the outrage herself when asked by Variety, Bridgers said she found it “hilarious” people got so angry. “I stand by it!” she said. “The fact that it made people so mad is kind of what’s punk rock about it. No thought whatsoever went into what it represented or meant: I’d never done it before, so might as well do it [on Saturday Night Live], where it’s gonna be immortalised.”
She also contrasted the response to the incident to that which followed an infamous video where Gibson crushed hundreds of Firebird X guitars, saying: “It’s hilarious to me that people care so much, but, I mean, there’s a video of a steamroller crushing a bunch of Gibson [guitars] as a tax write-off because they weren’t selling all of their stock – let that piss you off!”
You can see details about the auction at its HandBid page here.