Goals for When I'm Super Rich, Ranked By Artistic Inspiration
By world historical standards, I’m very rich. What I mean is, regardless of how much property I have at the moment, my ability to pay people to solve problems exceeds that of every human being who was alive between the dawn of time and, let’s say, somewhere in the 1970s. And that’s probably true of everyone reading this blog.
So I shouldn’t need to tell you, although I will - it’s great. Really really great. I have multiple health problems that would have killed me, or would soon kill me, if I were not a person in a developed country with sick health insurance in the 21st century. That said, I often wonder what it would be like to be a lot richer than I am now. Like, money-doesn’t-matter rich. Nine figures at least. Not just lots-more-money-than-I-have-now rich, but also lots-more-money-than-anyone-else rich. Fortunately, there is lots of art to tell you what to do if you are that kind of rich.
This isn’t a list of things that I’d actually do if I were super rich. It’s a ranking of things I’d be inspired to do if I were super rich, based on art made by and/or for the super rich. Would I actually do all of these things? I certainly fucking hope so.
7. Do Good for Humanity
The Goal: Solving problems for other people and shit.
Art Inspired: The obvious one here is Batman, like, all the Batman shit out there. But nobody watches Batman movies (or reads comic books or whatever else - my own familiarity with Batman is mostly from The Animated Series) to think about how cool it would be to have the money to fight crime independently. Batman was originally a detective character, and is now an action superhero. And I think we all know that in real life, if someone put on a costume and went out to fight thugs on the streets, he’d get murdered in about five minutes. You ever read about people who do that? Put on costumes and fight crime? There are actually people that do that—it’s basically cosplay meets neighborhood watch. White people wandering around safe neighborhoods at six p.m. looking like assholes.
Not that I find it terribly inspiring, but I think a slightly more plausible example of a rich person doing good for humanity is the movie Contact. In Contact, the rich guy pulls strings and uses his own fortune to build a spaceship after the jerks who run world governments and kowtow to religious zealots block its construction. Also he lives in a space station because it saves him from cancer or something.
Would I Do It: The guy from Contact is basically Elon Musk in 40 years, and if I were super rich and aliens told me to build a spaceship, sure I’d do it. But I would also devote my fortune to solving climate change, like, today, which I think Bill Gates really is doing with his investments in direct air capture technology. Is that inspired by art, though? I think if anything there should be some inspirational mass media about heroic billionaires using their wealth to solve climate change, or at least just not be dicks.
If I did use my wealth to become a costumed superhero and/or villain, I’d become an absurdist weirdo like “Brick Frog” on Venture Bros. or “Captain Mucilage” on the animated version of The Tick. Both of which, I just learned, invented by the same guy.
6. Dominate the Old West
The Goal: Ride horses, murder bad guys, marry a buxom lass who knows how to preserve beef for the winter.
Art Inspired: Westworld, obviously. Because what I’d really want is a guaranteed-safe playground. What, you want I should get shot? Fuck that. I just want the trappings of the old west. The boots, the big black coats, cowboy hats, six shooters, whiskey, beef, adventure, and sex workers. But they should be robot sex workers that I don’t have to feel sympathy for, unless I choose to. Man, that would be great. Just don’t kill me, or make me feel guilty about any of it. Also, don’t let the robots pretend to be real people, ok? Westworld season 2 was really awful. (Generally, Westworld skips the 40-or-so-year period in which “Westworld” itself is a very successful playground for the super rich. That’s the part I want. Then let the robots revolt and murder everyone, fine. Let me have fun first.)
But actually, when I think of the old west, and the “Western” as a genre these days, weirdly the art that makes me want to get out there and live in the mountains is The Hateful Eight. That movie makes you feel like you’re trapped in a snowed-out Wyoming cabin, just being attacked by nature, yet snug by the fireplace with your percolated coffee and your giant pot of stew. The rest of the movie - a lot of murdering. Aside from that, I wouldn’t mind hanging out in that cabin.
Would I Do It: In real life I have arthritis, and cold weather really hurts my joints, and so again, in my rational mind I don’t actually want to move to Wyoming or anywhere in the rural west. But if I were super rich and could just totally dominate the weather, and nobody would make fun of me for preserving my own meat and walking around in a three piece wool suit for no goddamn reason? And I could shoot guns without getting shot back? And eat a ton of beef without worrying about climate change? And the sex workers, as noted above. It sounds pretty damn good. I don’t think I’d do it. I still want to.
5. Wear Inefficient Clothing
The Goal: If practicality were the game, we’d all wear yoga clothes all day, every day. And during the pandemic, uh, we are. We’re wearing yoga clothes and sweatsuits and pajamas all day. I hate it. I want to go back to my office and tie a piece of shiny fabric around my neck specifically because it makes no goddamn sense and only a really wealthy and privileged person would do it.
Art Inspired: Really, just about all the movies discussed in this list have beautiful clothes. Even Westerns - on the one hand, Western clothing is often practical in that you have very durable clothing made from whatever can be procured to survive the elements. But as soon as you get to town, you’ve got ladies in fancy gowns and men in three-piece suits. Deadwood foregrounds this element of Western culture, with characters speaking in a bizarre mixture of Shakespearean prose and variations on the word “cocksucker.” The clothes, like the language, are very overtly an effort to overcompensate for the brutality of the life they lead. And so you wonder…how different are we? Bum bum BUM…
We’re not. We’re burping, shitting, violent assholes. Our lives are brief, often painful, and there’s nothing afterwards. Clothes are a pretense, they help vivify the abstract concepts that do, in fact, compensate for the brutality of our actual lives. Clothes are dignity, beauty, desire, and occasionally comfort. But you just need a minimal amount of comfort - your clothes shouldn’t stab you, I guess - and then it’s whatever you can get away with.
A few works of art with great clothes that inspire me to become wealthy and buy clothes:
Casino Royale. “There are dinner jackets and there are dinner jackets.”
The Favourite. The clothes British royalty wear just to go shoot birds. Christ.
Barry Lyndon. This is an entire movie designed to look like paintings. The clothes are part of it.
Phantom Thread. See below. It’s not really a movie about clothes. But the clothes are pretty great.
Elizabeth and Elizabeth: the Golden Age. Really pushing the limits of practicality.
Would I Do It: It’s all a spectrum, right? Everyone has to have clothes. If I were super rich, would I wear wildly impractical clothing? It’s actually hard to say. It seems like the trend among the super rich, to the extent you can know such things from the odd picture or media report, is to wear business casual and sport casual all the time. Just, nice fabrics, well tailored. You don’t see a lot of black tie events anymore. Presumably someone is doing it, in Europe or whatever. So it becomes more a question of, if I became super rich, how much would I care about fitting in, versus looking like a work of art. See below.
4. Collect Great Paintings
John Singer Sargent, Mrs. Fiske Warren (Gretchen Osgood) and Her Daughter Rachel (1903)
The Goal: Own great paintings. I like paintings. I want to have a sick house (or several, see below) full of paintings.
Art Inspired: When the covid-19 pandemic hit, and I couldn’t leave the house, even with a kid and a very busy job, I suddenly had some time on my hands. At first, I invested that time into video games. That was a mistake. Between a sedentary job and a sedentary hobby and not being able to go outside, I ended up with a back injury that required surgery. Then, during recovery, I developed two new hobbies: (1) physical therapy, and (2) art.
Velazquez, Old Woman Frying Eggs (c. 1618)
I got super, super into art. I commissioned an oil painting of my family, which frankly is the best and most fun and most insane money I have ever spent. But I also did a lot of art history appreciation - basically, the Western European canon. And while there’s lots to love, I discovered I do have a favorite style (baroque and neo-baroque) and favorite artists (Velazquez, Rubens, Sargent).
Rubens, Samson and Delilah (1609-1610)
There are a few works that it really pains me to think I could never own - both because they are worth hundreds of millions, and because they’re owned by museums and will never be sold. That brings me to one artistic inspiration: The Last Man on Earth. It wasn’t my favorite show - I gave up mid-first season, once it became clear it was a show about rebuilding society, not about just the one guy doing insane shit for a few years before giving up on life. But boy, that first episode, where he moves a bunch of artwork into some mansion in Arizona? That’s cool, although I wonder why he dragged all the paintings there instead of, like, just living in the Met for a while. If I were somehow the lone survivor of humanity, I’d probably move into the Louvre or something. I mean, I might sleep in the basement or somewhere easier to heat than the main galleries. I don’t know. Sort of depends how much infrastructure survives.
The movie that best embodies my art collection ambitions as a super wealthy person in today’s society, however, is The Thomas Crown Affair. Now, true story: I saw this movie with my mother when I was twelve years old, and 95% of what I remember is trying to hide an erection during the very long Pierce Brosnan-Renee Russo sex scene. I had never seen porn before, or many movies with sex scenes, and it did not seem weird to me that the people having sex were, uh, my mother’s age. But let’s get past that. Let’s get past that. Let’s get past that. Let’s get - ok, so Thomas Crown Affair is about a super rich guy who likes art a lot, and he collects it, but he also takes joy in being so wealthy he can also destroy beautiful things. Like, a really cool racing boat and, in one scene, a “pretty little Renoir.” Man, I understand that impulse. If there’s anything better than owning beautiful stuff, it’s owning so much beautiful stuff that so many other people want that the only thing that gives you a boner is shredding it in front of them. I mean, I’ve never had that feeling and I doubt I ever will, but somehow I understand it. Anyway - the guy likes art.
Would I Do It: You’re god damn right I would. I’m going to do my best even starting now. I have a guy. I know what I want him to paint. It’s going to cost $8,000. That’s a pretty big expense to hide from your spouse. We’ll see!
3. Be Immune to Shame
The Goal: Never feel bad about anything, ever.
Art Inspired: Two things. First, Big Mouth. The “Shame Wizard.” Big Mouth hits me so hard, guys. I was an upper middle class, Jewish-ish kid from an East Coast suburb, and I’m roughly the same age as all the writers on the show. So while Big Mouth is universal in the sense that everyone has horrible, awkward puberty years that you spend the rest of your life trying to make up for, Big Mouth is also about kids in a very specific culture that is my culture. My culture may not be the source of all my shame about my puberty years (and beyond!) and I certainly feel more shame and guilt coming from my non-Jewish side, but regardless, having a television show not just depict but personify the most awful feelings of your life, in the exact setting of your life…it was cathartic, let’s say that.
On Big Mouth, there’s an episode where the Shame Wizard is banished, and the kids feel no shame. And so of course they get into some depraved shit right away. And you know what that made me think of - Eyes Wide Shut. Now there are some people who feel no shame. Perhaps a reasonable fear of exposure, but I like to think they wear the masks because it looks cool. One of the things Eyes Wide Shut is very clearly telling us, though, is that there is modestly rich (Tom Cruise’s character, a very successful doctor, probably a multimillionaire), and super rich (the people at the orgy). And the distance between those two is like the distance between dreams and reality. I want to live in that dream world. (I also wonder: if you were a billionaire when Eyes Wide Shut came out, wouldn’t you think to yourself “are we doing that? Why are we not doing that?” I guess the question presumes you’re not already doing that.)
I would be remiss if I failed to mention two arguably non-artistic inspirations here. So, specifically, I grew up in Washington, D.C. Although I am neither a football fan or a Republican, two of the defining personalities of my cultural milieu are Daniel Snyder and Donald Trump. Daniel Snyder - one of the most hated people in sports, bought the Washington Redskins, drove the franchise into the ground, randomly breaks laws and alienates the entire city, and gets away with it because what’s the alternative? Not watch football? He has no shame, he doesn’t care, and he does whatever the fuck he wants. Donald Trump. Nothing more need be written about Donald Trump. With both these guys, they’re such immense assholes, there’s such sadism in their public personae, it really is like performance art. I don’t want to do anything that either of these guys has specifically done with their lives, except two things: (1) get and/or be rich (arguably!) and (2) not be attacked by the Shame Wizard.
Would I Do It: Live without shame? I absolutely fucking would. I don’t know if I could, though, like, mentally. I’d have to be very rich for a very long time.
2. Employ Multiple Servants
The Goal: Own people! Legally!
Art Inspired: In the broadest sense, other people are the most interesting and powerful works of art. (See above.) So in a specific sense, what is more awesome than having other people around whose literal welfare depends on them focusing their mental and emotional energy on easing, simplifying, and beautifying your life? At least, that’s the conclusion I drew from Downton Abbey, a show I tolerated for a while because British people in pretty costumes.
Actually the art that makes me want to have servants is Remains of the Day, the 1989 novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s told in first person by a very classy English butler who devotes his life to the lord of his manor, sort of failing to understand how both of them are wasting their lives and maybe aiding the Nazis. The protagonist of Remains of the Day is an intelligent, sympathetic man of great emotional depth, who stuffs that shit way deep inside so he can be a really, really good butler. I want that guy on my team.
I also would like Jeeves from Jeeves and Wooster. Not that I’m as much of a bumbling idiot as Bertie Wooster - I wasn’t born rich, after all. But a guy who knows everyone and everything and can tell you which clothes to wear and smooth things over with your aunts? I have several aunts and would appreciate things being smoothed over.
(I haven’t watched the tv show, just read some of the books. But apparently, Hugh Laurie! Enjoy.)
Would I Do It: Of course I would. I just don’t relish the hiring process. It’s got to be really hard to find good people. Especially since we no longer have a professional servant class, or at least we don’t acknowledge one. That’s why you need multiple servants. Because once you get a really great butler/household manager person, that person takes care of all the human resources bullshit. I do not want to deal with that mess. What I really want is a house cleaner and a nanny. And I have those things (I’m modestly rich!), but only a few hours a week (I’m modestly rich!).
1. Own a “Country House” and a “City House”
The Goal: A second home. But really, a gigantic mansion in the country, and a gigantic mansion and/or condominium in the city. Fuck the suburbs!
Art Inspired: People talk about Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina like it’s a tragic love story of Anna Karenina and this guy Vronsky. Let me tell you what I remember of that plotline, which occupies literally 15,000 words out of 350,000 in the novel: Vronsky eats nothing but steak, so he can stay thin. Apparently people knew about carbs back in the 19th century. Go figure. Also, she dies in the end, because of trains. So many trains.
The other 335,000 words in the novel (for those of you not into counting words: most modern novels are 50-100k) are about Levin, a character obviously modeled on Tolstoy himself. And let me tell you about Levin: he goes to his “country house” which is really an estate thriving on the backs of “serfs,” which is what you call slaves who have the same skin color as you. He has really nice meals and he helps the serfs cut the grass, and he thinks about how he’d make a great serf if he really put his mind to it. And then he gets bored and goes to his “city house” and he has dinner parties and meets fancy people and plays games and dances. And then he decides that’s for phonies, and he goes back to his country house. And he has some really nice meals and he thinks about the serfs, and then he gets bored and goes back to the city house to see friends and have parties.
People: Levin is living the life. Do I want to read about it? Fuck no. But do I, in the middle of the covid pandemic, want to toggle between two different awesome houses, and have both my privacy and my friends at beck and call? Restaurants and culture, and natural beauty and solitude? Yes.
More recently, I’m inspired by Phantom Thread. Like Anna Karenina, you might think Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest masterpiece is about this love affair between people with strange dining habits, and you’d be partially correct. But you’d be forgetting that the main characters meet when Daniel Day Lewis’s fashion designer gets tired of the city and retreats to his “country house” for artistic regeneration. And then he goes out for breakfast, and it’s this scene and this breakfast order, which frankly doesn’t inspire me to have a country house so much as it inspires me to order that for breakfast. I mean, wow. I would not keep the waitress’s notepad though, I get that he’s trying to flirt but that’s fucking creepy.
But anyway, then the rest of the movie they just go from the city house to the country house and back several times. There’s some mushrooms involved, and everyone wears nice clothes. It’s great.
Would I Do It: I plan on doing this in the near future whether I’m super rich or, more realistically, I remain employed and grow modestly wealthier. But how great would it be to own a 20,000 square foot “country house”? And then you get bored of it and you go back “home” to your 15,000 square foot downtown penthouse. All managed by the servants, of course, because what, am I going to fucking vacuum? Never again, people. Never again, readers who are not my spouse, who is totally going to be on board with buying a second house some day.