Show me the money. Show it to me in the dedicated pages of national newspapers, in documentaries and TV series and on social media, where influencers make their money by showing me the money. Let me revel in all the clichés we’re offered – the poorer man’s idea of wealth, defined by supercars and mega-yachts, houses pent and country, dinky handbags and preposterous watches, fat cigars, deep tans, Tic Tac teeth and honed abs, for even the body is performative of money these days. Tom Wolfe would be slack-jawed.
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Forty years ago he coined the sadly forgotten term ‘plutography’, to capture the then prevailing trend for the publishing business to offer readers a monthly dose of full-colour insight into how the other half lived. The New York Times somewhat downplayed the meaning behind Wolfe’s coinage, no pun intended, describing it as capturing a demand for writing about the lifestyles of the much, much better off. Rather Wolfe’s ‘plutography’, of course, was more a deliberate play on ‘pornography’, with all that suggests of our baser natures, our compulsions.
He described it as the ‘graphic depiction of the acts of the rich’, the true motivation to titillate hidden by an ostensible desire to educate readers on design or antiques or fine food. He argued that the restraint of the 1960s and 1970s – when it would have been considered bad taste to flaunt your wealth – had broken down. ‘Greed is good’, as the 1980s had it. And we’ve been on a downward slope ever since, both in terms of the readiness of the rich to flaunt it – see John Caudwell’s recently unveiled £250,000 statue of himself – and in our obsession with it.
