Colin Sheridan: Is a €8m handbag a sign that moral rot within society is beyond redemption?

Irish Examiner

3 days ago

Last week, while most of us were trying to figure out whether we could stretch a pack of sausages to Wednesday, a handbag — yes, a handbag — sold for over €8m at auction.
Not just any handbag, mind you. This was Jane Birkin's handbag, a Hermès Birkin, apparently so fabulous it makes the Ark of the Covenant look like something you'd pick up in Mr Price.
Can you live in the handbag? Will the handbag score 12 goals from midfield for your favourite football team? Does the handbag masquerade as a consultant obstetrician?
I had to check the headline thrice to be sure it wasn't satire. But no, some anonymous collector with more money than shame decided that owning a dead woman's carry-all was worth liquidating the GDP of Latvia.
One wonders if the buyer realises that, in the end, it's still a leather sack for lugging around tampons, loose Polo mints, and the odd receipt from Boots.
We are in a golden age for absurdity. The global elite, presumably bored of space travel and tax avoidance, have turned to auctions to alleviate their crushing ennui.
They'll throw millions at anything with a whiff of celebrity: Hair clippings, stained lyric sheets, Willie Joe Padden's bloodstained head-sock. The only criterion is that it must be fundamentally useless.
Consider, if you will, the painting by the American artist Robert Ryman, which sold for $20m. A lovely canvas of — wait for it — white paint. Just white.
You'd be forgiven for thinking someone had accidentally left the undercoat unfinished and called it a day.
The shredded Banksy painting 'Love is in the Bin' exhibited at the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden in 2019. Picture: Uli Deck, DPA via AP
The Sotheby's catalogue, in all seriousness, described it as 'an exploration of absence and presence'. Fools! I would've given them twice as much absence and presence for half the price.
Then there's the shredded Banksy. You remember that one: Girl with Balloon, which was run through a hidden shredder the moment the hammer fell. The partial destruction somehow made it more valuable. It's now called Love is in the Bin and sold for €21m. Because nothing says 'serious art' like a prank worthy of a drunk teenager.
You can't even hang the thing without a health-and-safety risk assessment in case it completes the shredding mid-dinner party.
Not just about visual art
Lest you think this is purely a visual art problem, let's not forget the world of music memorabilia. Kurt Cobain's battered cardigan from MTV Unplugged went for €300,000. Not because it was woven from unicorn wool — though at that price, it ought to be — but because it still had a few cigarette burns in the sleeves.
Some poor intern probably spent the entire auction standing guard over it in a humidity-controlled glass box, as if it were the Shroud of Turin.
Of course, nothing tops the slice of stale wedding cake from Charles and Diana's nuptials, which fetched €1,800.
Imagine explaining that to your dinner guests. If ever proof was needed that the British monarchy has warped the collective brain, there it is.
I realise that by now, I sound like the man shouting at a shredded cloud. But can we acknowledge that an €8m handbag is a sign that the moral rot within society is perhaps beyond redemption?
Jane Birkin herself was reportedly ambivalent about the bag's absurd symbolism, once complaining that it was too heavy to be practical.
Indeed, if you were the owner of such a thing, you'd be terrified to take it to Dunnes Stores for fear someone would brush against it with a trolley and take €200,000 off its resale value.
What do the owners do with this stuff? Keep it in a bank vault? Gloat over it at dinner parties? Invite friends round to sniff the lining? 'Go on, that's the authentic aroma of 1960s Gauloises and existential dread.'
And yet the madness persists. We live in a time when working people must remortgage their house if they want a new boiler, but if you're rich enough, you can drop seven figures on the decaying remnants of someone else's broken dreams.
The whole ecosystem thrives on scarcity and snobbery. There's no limit to the price as long as it remains tantalisingly out of reach for the rest of us.
One could argue there's poetry in it — a reminder of the surreal hierarchy of value humans assign to the meaningless. But I'd wager it's mostly ego and the desperate need to be seen as a connoisseur.
In reality, the only thing you're a connoisseur of is spectacular bad taste and the art of burning cash.
So, to whoever bought Jane Birkin's handbag: Congratulations. May you treasure your absurd purchase as a monument to the world's most expensive nonsense.
And when the day comes that the bottom falls out of the collector's market — and it always does — you can use it to carry your tears.