Do you have too much money? The New York Times has some shopping tips for you. (photo: Damon Winter/NYT)
Looking for some last-minute gift-giving ideas? The New York Times (12/19/14) is happy to help out.
The paper’s Paul Sullivan points you to the example of R. Couri Hay, “a society figure in Manhattan,” who has given his friends and loved ones such presents as a Damien Hirst painting, “two Andy Warhol prints of Marilyn Monroe,” a “Range Rover with a bow on top” and “a three-foot-tall Fabergé egg painted with koi fish.”
Once Hay offered a “socialite and animal rights activist” friend a plate of jewels, telling her “she could pick whichever one she wanted but that only one of them was real.” How delightfully whimsical!
He also “commission[ed] Peter Max, the pop artist, to create a painting from a photo of his mother and grandmother.” Of course, Hay, in addition to being “a society figure,” is also a PR agent, and Max is one of his clients, though the Times is too polite to mention this. So that might be more difficult for you to arrange, unless you’ve got undisclosed conflicts of interest of your own.
These don’t sound like the sort of things you’d buy? Perhaps you’d rather give “a $295,000 Christophe Claret Margot watch” that tells you whether “he loves me” or “he loves me not” when you click a button. Or you could buy your uncle a racehorse, or give your children “an extreme-sports vacation that will include tandem paragliding, ziplining and, of course, horseback riding, from Dubai to New Zealand.”
In the news-you-can-use department, the Times helpfully points out that “if the gift is worth more than $14,000 and is going to anyone other than a spouse,” the recipient needs to file a gift tax form. Thanks for the reminder!
This is the kind of advice you’d perhaps expect to get from a paper that in 1997 reported that “the $100-a-bottle wine, once an example of vulgar excess, is now an everyday occurrence,” and that alerted readers in a 2008 headline that “It’s Possible” to have a great meal for two for less than $100 (FAIR Blog, 12/11/08).
The Times might offer in its defense that this piece is labeled as one of Sullivan’s “Wealth Matters” columns, a feature specifically set up to give advice to the 1 percent (or the 0.01 percent) on how to “manage not only their money and fortune, but their overall well-being.” To which one can only note that it’s not a coincidence that the Times does not have a “Poverty Matters” column.
We just have to realize that the NYT is no longer a news paper, it is wealthy persons paper rag to wipe their nose with or put under the Birds cage.
All the news that’s fit to print
In gold leaf
I hate to break it to the NYT, but the uber-wealthy neither need their advice on how to spend money, nor read what they probably consider a liberal rag.
Survival under the new gilded-age economics requires the NY Times to weigh how much to cater to the wealthy’s frivolousness and vanity, and thereby pay the bills with associated ad revenue. Of course, such coverage risks contaminating the real journalism they still do (there’s quite a bit), but in principle I respect that they need a certain amount of this garbage in the paper.
I think the excellent Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan recently had a piece on just the balancing act I mention in the previous comment.
@ David G: You’re on target twice. Whatever else the NYT is, it’s news media, meaning it can no longer survive without bribes from the oil companies, and Margaret Sullivan is excellent.