Assinine Assets

A painting called To Beauty (1922) by Otto Dix

Juxtaposition can lead to wisdom, serendipitously. Consider the fact that the Guardian (12/6/06) I was reading this morning juxtaposed two entirely unconnected stories, viz., the UN University report on the deployment of wealth in the world and the auctioning of Audrey Hepburn’s plain black dress she wore in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

First the dough, then the dress. In 2000 one percent of the world’s population possesses forty percent of the globe’s natural wealth (GNW). Another GNW angle: the U.S.has 4.7% of the world’s population and 32.6 percent of the GNW. Now the dress: it sold for 467,200 English pounds! That’s a record, far outstripping (so to speak) the gingham garment Judy Garland wore in “The Wizard of OZ” for a piddling 140,000 pounds in 2005.

Heh, remember Marilyn Monroe’s singing “Happy Birthday” to JFK. The dress she wore went for 583,000 pounds in 1999. (As an American living on Euros, I flinched fiscally today when I took out 300 Euros from a German ATM—they call them Geldomats! My PNC on line account rang up 400 dollars. And a dollar is worth only half a pound these greenback plunging daze.)

The new Hepburn biography (Ellen Erwinn and Jessica C.Diamond, "Audrey Hepburn: The Legends, Pictures, and Memories") cites fan letters: In September 1944 parachutist Captain Roger Marley about to fight to recover her hometown Arnheim assured her "that had he known she was there he would have fought to the death to rescue her."

And a young man named Henry R. Bartenbach in writing for a picture and autograph deplored that he was not a rich man but just a fledgling butcher. The great Frankfurt School refugee, Leo Lowenthal, wrote a classic content analysis of Saturday Evening Post biographies showing a marked shift over two decades from productive titans like Andrew Carnegie to entertainment prodigies like Hepburn.

(I updated this study in the late 50's in Journalism Quarterly by subjecting Edward R.Murrow's "Person to Person" and Mike Wallace Interviews to the same analysis--with television exacerbating the transition from productive to merely entertaining.)

As I'm noodling these ominous shifts, I read that Dick Clark, of Philly "American Bandstand" fame, has just formally closed his teenocratic career by auctioning off his "assets". His "holy" mike brought a cool $33,000. A Madonna bustier a thinish $11,400. An Elvis Presley cape, $24,000. John gave Yoko a set of lithographs as a wedding gift, $54,000. (I'd like to see those, or at least know what they were.)

Long ago I did two TV series for WFIL-TV (Channel 6)'s "University of the Air"--one on architecture, the other on communication. The crew was the same ones who did Clark's "Bandstand". They used to tease in a friendly way about my minuscule audience, weekday mornings. I counter-taunted them by begging them to lend me a few South Philly fillies and then watch the audience engorge itself.

Of course mass entertainment didn't invent fan foolishness. Our pious ancestors used to collect relics of the True Cross. Those shards multiplied so egregiously that you could outfit a full lumberyard. They were trying to guarantee themselves a Happy Eternity. Mass fans just want to fill the emptinesses of their lives with vicarious pleasures. Both enterprises are dead enders.

And autograph collectors have always struck me as particularly empty amassers. I remember in 1975 at the world premiere of "Selma!" that marvelous flop at the Huntington Hartford Theatre in L.A. A young man was harassing an almost dead Groucho Marx (he had gotten off his close to deathbed to honor his friend, Martin Luther King, Jr.) for his signature, in spite of the obvious frustration of his "girlfriend"/nurse. I finally intervened and quietly but firmly told him to SCRAM. I wonder what circle in Hell Dante would consign such barbarians. And what circle for the Luxus Freaks.

Every way I turn I am faced with a Luxus explosion. For weeks now, the International Herald Tribune has been running an ad on a Luxury Fair to be held next month in Istanbul. Time magazine is running more and more “Design” issues, which are to the New Boom what Nieman-Marcus Christmas catalogs were back in the Depression! They explore paradoxes that the Bag (as in Handbag) is the new winner in High Fashion. Imagine all those anoxeric models practicing their traipsing down their gangways when all the future purchasers are after are their handbags. Outrageously high-priced handbags designed by the fashionistas whose dresses are just a come on. Where is Thorstein Veblen when we need them.

When we honor that sweet Indian economic guru who won the Nobel Peace Prize this year for his microcredit scheme, keep in mind the bottomless swamp of poverty he has to rescue his poor but exceedingly dependable women borrowers from. Every year the Wall Street Journal proudly announces its swiftly expanding list of New Millionaires. A Swiss equivalent has just listed its 60 richest citizens. I’m happy to report that one of my Gropius heritage heroes, the IKEA founder Ingvar Ramprad, rings the bell this year at 21 billion dollars.

I was seething with populist rage until I finished the Audrey Hepburn story. It turns out that the former owner of that iconic sheath, Dominique Lapierre, is giving all those rupees to City of Joy Aid (Calcutta) which was founded 25 years ago to “buy bricks to put the most destitute children in the world in the world into schools.” And in today’s Inquirer, the Comcast family millionaires are kicking in $20 million to help finance a new cancer fighting institute at Penn. We’ve been thrilling for months at the Gates/Buffett initiative to fight easy to abolish epidemics in Africa and elsewhere.

So there you have it. Obscene distortions in the distribution of wealth. Silly inflation of “cultural assets” (broadly enough conceived to include Hepburn’ sheath and Eakins’ “Gross Clinic”). And exploding human needs at home and abroad. Half of our citizens have been so infantilized by their TV boobs that they don’t even vote. What do they care if the federal government subsidizes sugar and wheat and corn conglomerates that keep poor farmers in the developing world poorer and poorer?

Where are the evangelical Christians with their pseudo wars against Plan B pharmaceuticals and stem cell research when our federal policies crudely subsidize millionaires? We need an moral agenda that their Jesus would accept—defend the weak and mock the Pharisees. And we need artists who satirize the super rich out of their foolish fantasies—the way Otto Dix and George Grosz did in Germany after World War I. (Most of them dream now of cashing in on the art stock market!)

Emerson was right when he moaned "Things are in the saddle/ And ride Mankind." Our thoughtful rich have already shown us how to be responsible with their wealth. Let us start a civilized conversation on how we can bring more and more of the poor out of their darkness. We need to deploy our assets in less assinine ways. Even Hepburn (who actually had a great record of supporting UNICEF) would thrill to learn what her old dress is now covering.