Gravity Sucks
Page 15
Of course, there is nothing wrong with making money. I’m all for it. If you don’t make it, you can’t spend it, I do get that, but it’s the pointy-nosed attitude that goes with this particular way of making money that I don’t like.
It’s making something gorgeous and life-affirming into homework. Something you do because it’s good for you, rather than because you just love it.
I loathe the idea of buying paintings specifically because they might increase in value. The only possible reason to buy a work of art is because you simply cannot live without it. Although at least with investment art you would have the daily pleasure of looking at the things before cashing in your chips.
And I do have a couple of wonderful elderly beatnik pals who have financed their twilight years by selling paintings and drawings acquired – simply for love – during their misspent youths. A Picasso drawing here, a Duncan Grant there, transmogrified into a roof, a garden, a comfortable chair and many a flagon of wine, although that was more luck than judgement.
The idea of buying wine as an investment, however – ie wine you never have any intention of drinking – makes me feel even iller than quaffing it all would. Laying wine down to age for your greater future supping pleasure is one thing, but laying it down to sell? What a self-limiting attitude to life.
And I feel exactly the same about taking this approach to clothing. Frocks as an investment possibility has emerged with the boom in vintage, and means that the old Ossie Clarke frock your auntie bought when she was a young thing in London in the 1970s is now worth a small fortune – but only if she wore it once and has kept it in acid-free tissue paper ever since.
If she had a good time in that dress and wore it to the Rainbow Room at Biba, San Lorenzo, Mr Chow and the after-premiere party of Don’t Look Now, where she spilled red wine and vomit all over it, and then conceived your favourite cousin while still wearing it, it’s virtually worthless. But it might mean rather a lot to her, don’t you think?
This struck me on a personal level when I went to the Vivienne Westwood exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London recently and saw garments on display in it that I still own.
It was well weird, seeing the bondage pants and obscene T-shirts that I wore night and day for a couple of years displayed in great seriousness in glass cases at such an august institution. While mine lie like dead dogs in a trunk in my bedroom.
Had I never worn them, they would now be worth serious money on Ebay. But which would have given me greater pleasure in the long-term scheme of my life? Making a few hundred dollars to fritter away on middle-age comforts, or the joy of being nineteen and wearing the scariest coolest clothes on earth?
No contest.