In recent years, The New York Times has morphed into something more than our paper of record with occasional mistakes. In its advertisements, particularly in its print editions, it has become the Weekly Shopper of the Very Rich—and not just the New York Very Rich, but, keeping up with the lifestyles of Milllionaires Without Borders, the Global Very Rich. Who but a Russian oligarch could afford some of the properties advertised regularly in the paper’s Sunday Magazine?
A marginally less plutocratic ad that ran, full-page, in Sunday's paper nonetheless drives home the same lesson that these property offerings and the recent $450 million purchase of DaVinci's (or somebody's) Salvator Mundi should have made screamingly clear: that the rich have too goddamn much money, and not quite knowing what to do with it all, are bidding up prices to absurd levels.
The Sunday ad announced a forthcoming (December 10) sale of New York Yankee memorabilia, to be conducted by Heritage Auctions, which terms itself “the world's largest collectible auctioneer.” Among the items were a bat that Babe Ruth used and signed during the 1920 season (which Heritage estimated would go for “$600,000 plus”), the bat which Lou Gehrig wielded in 1939 in his “final two home run games” (which Heritage estimated would go for “$800,000 plus”), and a 1992 scouting report on Derek Jeter (whose value Heritage set at a mere $50,000 plus).
Now, Babe Ruth's 1920 season was possibly the most remarkable, and disruptive, in the history of American sports. He hit 54 home runs that year, more than any other American League team hit—thereby propelling baseball from a low-scoring game of singles and stolen bases into the outta-the-park slugfest it soon became. Gehrig was a great player whose tear-jerking 1939 farewell to the game and its fans, as he began to succumb to ALS, was the stuff of heroism and grace.
But, as with the DaVinci (or the somebody), the value that the auctioneer has put on these bats says more about the huge pools of money in which the rich now splash around than it does about Ruth or Gehrig or their feats at the plate. As in the Gilded Age, such auctions have become nothing more than displays of conspicuous consumption—except that, since they're now conducted by phone with unidentified (to the public) bidders, the consumption is conspicuous while the consumer remains self-protectively inconspicuous.
And about that Jeter scouting report: How soon until some stars' contracts—the written documents—are put up for bid? And will the value of the auctioned contracts exceed the dollar amount that the contracts stipulated would be paid to those stars? As our plutocrats grow richer and richer (a process that the Republican Congress felt irresistibly impelled to accelerate), that day can't be far off.
