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The emperor's new guitars | page 1, 2
My associate quickly phoned the Crossroads Centre at Antigua to ask what kind of drug addicts we needed to be to apply for "free treatment," care of Subcommandante Clapton. Does free treatment include air fare, we wondered? The staff was remarkably unhelpful, and told us to consult the center's Web site. What kind of hopeless drug addicts are we if we have Web access, we wondered? Does the Crossroads Centre cater exclusively to Antiguan drug addicts? Are they all on the Web, perhaps? All of our questions went mysteriously unanswered. Anyway, the event was a phenomenon, because what was being auctioned off were relics of the True Cross: the guitars that Eric played when Eric was his best, the guitar god, the Clapton who wrote and performed the seminal "Layla." It was better that today's Clapton wasn't actually present for the auction, being all old and VH1 and adult contemporary and full of sober crotchetiness in a black dinner jacket; it made all of the necrophiliac fan worship that much more so: There was a time in the '70s when Clapton was a horse fiend, and burnt by the eye of God and perceived as brilliant, and ironically, it was this dead, smack-inspired Clapton the auction people were pouring money over, much in the way the prices will triple for a dead painter. Christie's anticipated most of the guitars selling for around $5,000 to $8,000 -- not a single guitar sold for under $14,000, and that was right at the beginning of the auction, when there were disgusted coughs and guffaws in the aisles; it was Beanie Babies, we all thought; it was Tickle Me Elmo, a sudden group fad swimming into hysteria. Then everyone caught the fever, and nobody was coughing anymore, even when the mid-range guitars hit $45,000 to $60,000. Cintra Wilson Cintra Wilson's column appears every other Wednesday in People + Archives
The room at Christie's was packed to bursting with middle-aged rich people full of adolescent pre-concert adrenaline. Most of the buyers seemed to be fat old rock 'n' rollers, gray-haired balding boys with ponytails wearing Hawaiian shirts and prescription sunglasses -- Christ, maybe 200 of those. There were a lot of mealy business boys, and some perplexing older women in Prada dresses with ancient green tattoos visible above the neckline. And of course, the row of beautiful boys and girls in crisp little jackets, manning the telephones for the anonymous big money. When "Brownie," the "Layla" guitar, the last lot on the auction block, turned around in the little carousel, and "Layla" started blasting over the loudspeakers, the room flipped into the latent chaos it had been politely suppressing all day. People stood up and howled. Everyone took flash-pictures. People began salaaming the stage, bowing to the old guitar, with the varnish worn off the frets from Clapton wizardry. Others like me began demurely headbanging. They started the bids at $200,000. Chills ran up my legs. When the bids ended at $450,000, we all were nauseated and euphoric; the post-obscene-splurge thrill of guilt and dirtiness coursed through us all like a contact high on the dance floor. Oooh, I realized. This is how these people party. The whole thing was too interesting; a mass psychosis, an escalating of value for things that had been touched by fame, an escalation that informed and invented itself every time the bid jumped another $10,000; the roomful of people realized that they were turning up the value on pop cultural objects forever; they were deciding what icons were worth, what their exalted memories of these icons were worth, and praying to them in the only profound way Americans know how to pray anymore, which is with money. After the auction and piranha-tub of a press conference, where they informed us that Michael J. Fox was one of the lucky money boys who now owned a piece of the Clap, the pinkly elated check writers could be found sitting in the carpeted corridors, strumming their own rusty, thumb-screwed renditions of the Clapton repertoire, shrug-faced and apologetic for the cameras, already rubbing the magical fingerprints off the frets with their sweaty, rich little mitts. There's a piece of the True Cross in a triptych in the J.P. Morgan Library, which the old sot chucked into his shopping basket at one point along with a Gutenberg Bible or three. The moral of the story is that everything famous is Holy, and the old rules don't apply anymore; money can buy you anything, anything you want, love, talent, beauty, credibility, spirituality, whatever. The world is on the auction block, baby, all you need is the clams.
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