Former Guided by Voices frontman Robert Pollard has put his first collage up on eBay. Pollard has been selling posters, original pressings of old albums and other miscellany there for a while, but this is the first time he is selling an original piece of art.

This first piece, The Astral City Slickers, was used as the cover art for the 1997 Guided by Voices album Mag Earwig. The opening bid? $5,000. That's no typo. Pollard's past offerings have fetched ungodly amounts (including $6,200 for an original pressing of the GBV album Propeller), but this seems a bit steep even by those standards. Perhaps it's a bias against collage, a form of art most of us perfected in elementary school, but it's amazing to think that the winning bidder will pay mid to high four figures for four or five things clipped from magazines and glued to a piece of cardboard. It would be cool to own the original artwork for one of my favorite albums by one of my favorite bands, but I won't find it hard to pass. The cheaper route is to pick up the two volumes of Eat, Pollard's "literary magazine," that include poems, snippets of song lyrics and collages.

More power to Pollard if he actually sells this and other pieces slated for auction. If you can get someone to give you the price of a decent used car for a 5"-by-5" collage, by all means do it. As he told me earlier this year in an interview for PopMatters: "Why should I not make money on that? It's my art. Some people think, 'Why are you selling this stuff on eBay; are you desperate or trying to gouge the fans?' No, I'm not, because it's my art, and artists sell their stuff, don't they?"

Sure they do. But if Pollard is able to land $5K for this collage, don't be surprised if starving artists all around the country start up obscure indie rock bands as a way to raise their profile.