Money Matters
New Media maven, Mozart, and the Whitney Biennial, plus, behind the paywall, power brokers and Paris travel news. What else do you need to know about this week?
Eat The Rich
With our work at Vogue, Elle Decor, and Harper’s Bazaar, we’ve spent most of our careers contending with the foibles and fancies of the wealthy, everything from Anne Bass’s Rothkos to Marie Helene de Rothchild’s placement. Rich people shit. We cloaked all that in Irving Penn photos and Billy Norwich and Julia Reed bylines, but essentially that’s what we were dealing with. So, we were intrigued when a Substack newsletter with that exact name appeared a few months ago and were eager to meet the journalist behind it. Here, Editors@Large talks to Carson Griffith.
What was the craziest rich person behavior you have ever encountered?
I’m working on a story now about women hiring stylists when they are getting plastic surgery. Depending on the procedure, they want different looks for pre-surgery, post-surgery, and then for the big reveal.
How did you come up with the idea for Rich People Shit?
The question I’m asked most often is what I cover. For years I’ve answered the same way: rich people shit. It’s essentially my beat translated into newsletter form. I liked the name because it gave me room to move around. I wouldn’t be stuck writing only about travel or fashion or finance. The newsletter is about cultural capital, which is the ecosystem that forms wherever money, influence, access, and taste start reinforcing each other (and not always at the same time). It’s the world of private clubs and art and luxury real estate and tech founders and media barons and the various intermediaries who keep the whole thing moving. Some subscribers assume I’m going to flatter the wealthy. Others assume I’m going to spend my time trying to eat the rich. Both will be disappointed. I’m mostly just observing how the ecosystem works. Occasionally with a little arch humor, but otherwise with curiosity.
What’s been the response?
People love the name. I credit it for the newsletter’s immediate momentum. I picked up thousands of subscribers in a matter of days, which was overwhelming because this is the most personal thing I’ve ever done. I’m more of a behind-the-scenes type of person, so writing in the first person and putting the spotlight on myself is not particularly my scene.
What story prompted the biggest reaction?
The Ryan Murphy exclusive about his new series brought in the largest wave of free subscribers. The piece that converted the most paid readers was an interview with a French investigative journalist who explained Hérmes’ elusive blue boxes reserved for VVIPs and the Instagram counterfeiter attracting the most attention in that world.
How did your background prepare you for RPS?
My first real editor was Frank DiGiacomo at the Daily News. Frank knew how to build a page, how to balance a mix of stories, and he can turn a phrase like few people I’ve worked with. Almost seventeen years in, I’ve worked with hundreds of editors and written for most of the magazines and newspapers you’ve heard of. I feel as comfortable reading legal filings as I am reading the Styles section. RPS isn’t just what I’m capable of doing. RPS is what I want to be doing. Anyone who has been around publishing can tell you that’s not something you get to say very often in this business.
Mozart We Hardly Knew Ya
Who was it that said Beethoven will bring you to God, but Mozart is God? I don’t know enough about classical music to answer that, but I’m curious about the exhibit, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Treasures from the Mozarteum Foundation of Salzburg opening at the Morgan Library on March 13th and bringing objects from the Salzburg collection across the Atlantic for the first time, including Mozart’s clavichord on which he composed The Magic Flute, his childhood violin, and his walking stick. The exhibit will also draw on the Morgan’s collection of music manuscripts, letters, and first editions to evoke Mozart’s life and creative output in both Salzburg as a youth, and later in Vienna where he lived and worked with his wife, Constanze. The exhibit runs through May 31st and if you want to brush up on your Mozart knowledge, and find an answer to my question above, a three-part course will be offered online. KB
The Biennial Is Back
It’s an art world tradition—complaining about the Whitney Biennial. And usually, there’s plenty to complain about. All too many iterations have featured earnest denunciations of racism, environmental devastation, the evils of corporations, the corruption of politicians. Too often the show felt like a round-up of liberal pieties made visual. Even true believers, like me, felt lectured to, even harangued. There was not a great deal of visual pleasure. But this year’s edition, on view through August 23rd, marks a noticeable shift. Yes, there are political works, and the degradations of nature, especially, remain a concern for several of the artists. But even here the responses seem more thoughtful, elegiac even. In this Biennial there is room for beauty, warmth, even charm.
There is a feeling of almost tenderness. It’s there in Emilie Louise Gossiaux’s drawings of herself with her late beloved dog, in Jasmin Sian’s delicate doily-like drawings cut out of deli bags, in Taína H. Cruz’s paintings and her wall drawing of a figure like a grown-up, rampaging Eloise. Carmen de Monteflores’s bold cutout paintings of entwined figures from the ‘60s are shown with delicate wax sculptures of sleeping toddlers by her daughter Andrea Fraser. On the terrace, Kelly A. Kaslin has constructed a replica in glass brick of the chimney of her house in Altadena, all that remained after the devastating wildfires. These works, and many others, made me want to know more. In the past I would too often emerge thinking, enough! MB
Power Player
The announcements of all the big spring books proved disappointing for one group—
