When you browse through Austin's real estate listings on a daily basis (and who doesn't?), you start to notice something. Guitars. Lots and lots of them, sprinkled throughout staged photos of homes for sale, running the gamut of price points and styles.
Some are in plain sight.
Others make a kind of "Where's Waldo?" game out of it, even hiding in their cases on occasion.
Some are barely there, shapes flashing in the the corner of your eye.
While others make quite the show of it.
Some even indulge in the Caligula-like excess of showing off their Bo Diddley cigar-box model. (Which, it occurs to us, may have been inspired by an incident in HBO's execrable series Vinyl.)
Some manage to look both artful and like someone could still actually play them.
While others are transparent props for HomeAway's promotional SXSW "birdhouse" accommodations.
Purely decorative guitar art is a close companion of the guitar-as-lifestyle-identifier motif.
And then there's always straight-up pandering.