Buying a Piece of Divinity From Where Jackie Dwelt
In light of last week’s bull market in Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis paraphernalia at Sotheby’s auction house in New York, it is fortunate that no one seems to have documented Onassis strolling across the Brooklyn Bridge or we might have had some overzealous billionaire bidding a fortune for the landmark. As it was, bidders acted like Weimar Germans pushing their wheelbarrows of money to the grocery store. A necklace of fake pearls, valued at $700, sold for $211,500; a set of golf clubs for $772,000; a $400-cigarette lighter for $85,000; a $30,000- Louis XVI desk for $1.43 million. The list of craziness is as long as the 584-page catalog.
The simplest analysis of this hyper-inflation is that Onassis’ legion of fans saw these castoffs in the world’s richest garage sale as religious relics--fragments of the cross suffused with divinity. Indeed, we live in a society where celebrities like Jackie O fulfill many of the traditional functions of religion. The famous provide models of behavior, if not morality, and they give us a taste of transcendence. Ruminating on Jackie, we can imagine what it would be like to be her, to seem to hover elegantly above life, as she did. To own a piece of Jackie brings us even closer to Thee. Some people go to Graceland, the American Lourdes, to be blessed; others, it seems, go to Sotheby’s.
But, in some ways, the analogy of celebrities to gods and their junk to religious relics obscures a larger factor in the price of Onassis’ stuff: the extent that celebrity has become the standard of value in our society. It goes without saying that these same items owned by you or me would be basically worthless. Their only value comes from the fact that Jackie owned them, wore them, touched them. Jackie invested her celebrity in them. She “celebritized” her objects.
Obviously, there is nothing new in fans wanting some memento of their heroes, but, traditionally, collectors wanted not just any object the famous owned but one that symbolized the achievements the person was famous for--Babe Ruth’s bat, say, or Ernest Hemingway’s typewriter. The totemic power of these items came from what they were used for, not just that they happened to be used by Ruth or Hemingway.
But that was in an era when one had to do something first in order to be celebrated. The genius of our age has been to disengage accomplishment from celebrity. By eliminating the middleman, we have made celebrity itself the accomplishment, seizing upon individuals who have done quite little, except be famous. To be honest, even Onassis’ accomplishments hardly justify the devotion we witnessed last week or the prices paid for her possessions. She was a dignified woman under trying circumstances, and I have no doubt that she was also a good one, but her power, really, was to hold the eye not move the heart.
Because celebrity itself and not accomplishment creates the standard of value nowadays, the traditional relationship between a celebrity and his or her artifacts has been reversed. Where the brilliance of the work once reflected glory on the individual, the brilliance of the individual now reflects glory on the work and on more than the work, since the work is often nonexistent, on anything within the celebrity’s orbit. Hence, the aura around Jackie’s goods, however insignificant their role in her life.
This is the “celebrity echo effect.” Whatever contributed to a person’s gaining recognition, the recognition rebounds off the person back into every object of his--the clothes he wears, the women he has been involved with, the restaurants he eats in, the salon where he gets his hair cut. What’s more, the echo is far louder than the original shout, because celebrity is always louder than whatever occasioned it.
Perhaps the first great manifestation of the celebrity echo effect was the auction of artist Andy Warhol’s estate in 1987. Warhol was an inveterate collector of kitsch. He loved knick-knacks, gewgaws and gimcracks. He had a large collection of Swatch watches. Again, the intrinsic value of this stash, things you find at the average yard sale, was virtually nil. But it was owned by Warhol: His celebrity echoed back into it. To own one of these objects was to share a covenant with Warhol. It was like having a celebrity in your home. Which is why things that would have otherwise been chucked into the garbage fetched hundreds of thousands of dollars from bidders.
The Onassis auction improves upon the Warhol auction exponentially, because Onassis was an exponentially larger celebrity than Warhol. But there is another difference, too, this one not just in degree, but in kind. The Warhol bidders took home their cookie jars and their Swatch watches and faded back into obscurity. The Onassis bidders are getting a flush of the thing itself: celebrity. One victorious bidder boasted he had never expected the publicity he was receiving for having shelled out $574,500 for a cigar humidor. It had, he said, been worth more to him that the cost of the item. Indeed, he was on a TV talk show to say so.
This is the ultimate echo. It reverberates off Onassis to her objects, then off her objects to their new owners. These folks may have set out seeking a share of her divinity, but with all the attention focused on the auction, they also got a tiny piece of their own divinity in the bargain. In a society where celebrity is everything, even $574,500 may be a small price to pay for a moment in the spotlight where Jackie once dwelt.*
* The sale continues. See Page 2.
