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The fabled tchotchkes were shown in advance to conclaves of socialites and patient lines of ordinary folk in New York City, Palm Beach, Fla., and Geneva -- though not in England, where the dead Windsors have the kind of sociopolitical karma that, in the discreet words of Marcus Linell, a marketing director who was in charge of the sales, "could have spoiled things." Most of the jewelry was florid stuff from the '40s and '50s, of no stylistic distinction, with some good stones and a few inventive settings. None of that mattered. Sotheby's had projected a total sale of $7.5 million; the two-day affair fetched $50 million (which, in accordance with the Duchess's will, went for the benefit of medical research at Paris' Pasteur Institute). The well- known bauble collector Elizabeth Taylor phoned in from Los Angeles to pick up a diamond clip for $565,000.
One thinks of this event as ugly social comedy at one's own risk. Of course such sales are parodies. But the point is that they are no more so, these days, than the sale of a Van Gogh. The big auction, as transformed by Sotheby's and Christie's, is now the natural home of all that is most demeaning to the public sense of art. Sunflowers was once alive, and now it is dead -- as dead as bullion, or Eanum Pig's bracelets.