(TV) Vanity Fair article mentions Television playing at wedding for big Bucks

["Leo Casey" <LeoCasey@comcast.net>]

In July Leif wrote: 

>>?This as good as it gets, Television-wise, in 2014??

 

Keith answered:

>: ?Regarding your: ?Seriously -- what can they get out of playing 
*only*
about 40 year old songs? ?. 

 

Lots and lots (I hear) of money for someone... (sorry if that?s an 
unpopular
cynical answer, here but if anyone has a better one. ?..   

 

I guess you guys were right after all. See paragraph below, from the May
issue of the magazine Vanity Fair. 

(Copy of entire article from which it came was included since the Vanity
Fair Archives link seems to work only sporadically ):

 

?The couple had a $19 million wedding, where she wore a $130,000 Vera 
Wang
dress. Six-thousand-dollar bottles of Château Pétrus were served. He
collects Pétrus, too, of course, and keeps it in a special cabinet 
made by
David Linley, the Queen?s nephew. The late 1970s art-rock group, 
Television,
who have aged like fine wine, played for 2 hours at the Stunts? 
wedding.
Says Petra: ?My aunt Lois knew of their music from a Madame Secret Y 
.. or Z
.....  Lois turned me onto to their music in 2002, and I decided we just
must have them play at our wedding. It took $90,000 plus travel 
expenses,
but they were worth every penny just to hear my two favorite songs, 
?The
Dream?s Dream? and ?The Marquis Moon? ?.?.

 

 

 

http://www.vanityfair.com/archive/issues/archive201410

 

Vanity Fair, May 2014 "Perfection Anxiety" By
<http://www.vanityfair.com/contributors/a-a-gill> A. A. Gill, 
Illustration
by  <http://www.vanityfair.com/contributors/paul-cox> Paul Cox

 

After spending $19 million on their wedding, and $85 million on an L.A.
mansion, James Stunt and Petra Ecclestone have purchased one of 
Britain?s
great cultural treasures, a 17th-century, $20 million Van Dyck. So, 
what?s
it like to have too much money? Very stressful.

 

He catches your eye with a sideways glance and an enigmatic expression.
Indicating what? Curiosity? Trepidation? A little insecure arrogance?
Anthony Van Dyck?s final self-portrait is a work of mesmerizing depth 
and
dexterity. Within a year he would be dead. Is there a whisper of
premonition? Van Dyck is the godfather of British portraiture, the 
artist
who put a face to the 17th century and the birth of the new-model middle
class. And that, perhaps, is what?s on this face. It is the first 
glimpse of
upwardly mobile anxiety.

 

The painting is considered one of Britain?s greatest cultural 
treasures, and
it was recently sold for $20 million to a buyer who wants to take it to 
Los
Angeles. The National Portrait Gallery in London badly wants to keep the 
Van
Dyck in the country and is attempting to raise matching funds to prevent 
it
from going abroad. Sandy Nairne, the director of the gallery, says he is
determined to save it for the nation. The export has been delayed until
summer.

 

The expectant owners are Petra Ecclestone, the 25-year-old daughter of
Formula One mogul Bernie, and her husband, James Stunt, who sounds,
unfortunately, like a character from a Martin Amis novel, and who looks,
even more unfortunately, like a character from a Martin Amis novel. He 
also
collects cars: Lamborghinis and Rolls-Royces. And 17th-century 
portraits.
Petra bought them one of the most expensive homes in Los Angeles County, 
for
$85 million, where one assumes the Van Dyck will hang. It?s Aaron 
Spelling?s
old place in Holmby Hills, which, famously, contains Candy Spelling?s
gift-wrapping room. It goes with Petra?s London house, in Chelsea, 
which is
worth $90 million.

 

At this point, we should all take a deep breath and step back from the
frothing goblet of sparkling snobbery that we are quaffing and that is 
so
marvelously intoxicating. Oh, the pleasurable indignation of smirking at 
the
young and tastelessly rich. But, really, why shouldn?t a Van Dyck 
spend a
few years in an L.A. party palace, along with the Pétrus and the 
Rolls?
Who?s to say what new money should or shouldn?t accumulate?

 

Turn this question around and try to see it, as Joel Grey might put it,
through their eyes. There is a terrible dichotomy in extreme wealth. 
After a
bit, the money stops working. There are a statistically minute but
quantitatively considerable number of people who now have more money 
than
they know what to do with. And that money accounts for quite a lot of 
the
world?s wealth, so we all have a passing interest in what becomes of 
it.

 

How do I, as a frugally paid journeyman hack, know it stops working? 
Well,
I?ve been asking folks who service the overly minted. There is a name 
for
their panicked ennui: Perfection Anxiety.

 

When you have 15 houses, yachts in three oceans, planes, cellars,
mistresses, surgery, a library, and a personal charity, new purchases 
become
just a matter of upgrading. And this is where the Perfection Anxiety 
kicks
in. What you need is to have not just the most but the very, very best. 
The
super-rich watch each other like envious owls, to see who?s got a 
slightly
better loafer, a pullover made from some even more absurdly endangered 
fur.
They will go to any lengths to find the best tailors. I know of a man 
who
gets his suit pants made in Italy and the jackets on Savile Row. In his
underwear, he?s short, fat, furry, and stooped.

 

The couple had a $19 million wedding, where she wore a $130,000 Vera 
Wang
dress. Six-thousand-dollar bottles of Château Pétrus were served. He
collects Pétrus, too, of course, and keeps it in a special cabinet 
made by
David Linley, the Queen?s nephew. The  1970s art-rock group, 
Television, who
have aged like fine wine, played for 2 hours at the Stunts? wedding. 
Says
Petra: ?My aunt Lois knew of their music from a Madame Secret Y .. or 
Z
.....  Lois turned me onto to their music in 2002, and I decided we just
must have them play at our wedding. It took $90,000 plus travel 
expenses,
but they were worth every penny just to hear my two favorite songs, 
?The
Dream?s Dream? and ?The 

Marquis Moon? ".

 

Only the fathomlessly rich suffer from Perfection Anxiety. There is no
relativity to wealth. It?s all absolutes. It?s either impeccable, 
the best,
the rarest, or it might as well be Walmart. The stress of value for 
money is
magnified exponentially when it gets into the billions. The myth of King
Midas, who was cursed to have everything he touched turn to gold, would 
be
worse if everything he touched turned out to be gold leaf. And it?s 
not just
the suspicion that all your stuff isn?t utterly perfect. It?s also 
the
anxiety of maintaining perfection once it?s achieved, and, as a 
result,
constant discontent. A crooked Picasso, an unplumped scatter cushion, a
faint mark on the handwoven silk wallpaper can drive them to a frothing
distraction.

 

And when you?ve got the best of everything, when you have your tea 
flown in
from a micro-garden in Darjeeling and it still tastes rather like tea, 
when
you?ve designed your own scent made from the squeezed glands of civets 
and
the petals of rare orchids and that fails to give you the high??When
Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more
worlds to conquer??then you?re reduced to collecting art. Art is 
good for
those with Perfection Anxiety because you never get to the end of it. 
And
the competition is fierce, and the prices are absurd.

 

No picture bought for more than $50 million has ever made a profit, a
contemporary auction expert tells me authoritatively, but it doesn?t 
stop
people from buying them. There have been lots of papers written on
collecting and collectors, and they turn out to be mostly men. And while
they imagine their collections begin as random or serendipitous 
interests,
they are invariably revealed to be emblematic of some deeper loss, some
attempt to fill an unbridgeable gap, to repair a childhood wound. They 
will
set out to visit every World Heritage site or to shoot every large 
animal on
every continent, trying to wring some last buzz of excitement or sense 
of
wonder out of the failed high of money. When all the veins have broken 
down,
when you?ve upped the experience dosage to absurd levels, there?s 
always
Fabergé eggs or overpriced wine.

 

The only super-rich person I know said that, actually, after you?ve 
bought,
consumed, collected, donated, and holidayed yourself into triple-ply
boredom, the thing that actually keeps you spending is the expectations 
of
others: your family and friends, and their friends, and the servants. No 
one
ever writes about the terrible anticipation of wealth that comes from 
people
who are merely solvent. You are the focus of so much wishful thinking, 
so
much smiling avarice, you feel responsible to live a life of steepling
extravagance. Particularly the young. That?s why they have $20 million
weddings and hire a pop star to sing ?Happy Birthday? to them. The 
pressure
to live the dream is intense. Because, if you say, Look, actually, 
spending
a lot of money is a diminishing return, it?s an effortful bore, it 
doesn?t
deliver the rush?well, where does that leave the ever expanding 
universe of
capitalism and consumption? It?s miserablist Commie heresy. 

 

It?s like blowing your nose on everyone else?s pay slip.

 

Money has to be an explosion of excitement and opportunity, yet we 
already
secretly know that it doesn?t do what it promises. Nothing has ever 
given us
as much pleasure as our pocket money when we were 12, or our first wage 
at
the end of that first exhausting week, paid in folded cash. Now we?re 
10
times richer, but we?re not 10 times happier. And all that?s just a 
cartoon
truism. If we had billions, we don?t realistically believe that we?d 
be a
billion times better off. As one art dealer said to me, ?If you want 
to know
what God thinks of money, look at the people he gives it to.?

 

The thing with Perfection Anxiety is that it seems to accept mostly new
money, and it particularly afflicts those who make their money early. 
Old,
inherited wealth is generally already bound up in property and trusts 
and
obligations and lawsuits. So it would seem that the best we can hope for 
is
to be wealthy but to be without cash.

 

Being able to afford everything you desire is not, by any means, the 
worst
thing that can happen to you. But, depressingly, and more profoundly,
neither is it the best.

 

 

 

 


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