WHAT A YEAR
Harry Styles’ breakout and three other pop culture moments,
If all goes as planned, it won’t be heard again for 100 years.
At a trippy listening session put on last month by Pharrell Williams, I was one of about 100 people present for the new one-off, a passionate riff on climate change. But just as quickly as he’d sprung the song on us, he helped lock the disc in a state-ofthe-art safe to be stored in the French cellars of Louis XIII Cognac — the company that had commissioned the song — where each bottle of cognac is also aged for a century.
No one was allowed to photograph or record the event, held in a large, decked-out warehouse in Shanghai. In fact, all our phones were taken from us and locked in airtight black cases. And the whole high-concept stunt? That the safe is only destructible when submerged in water. That is to say, the time capsule is well . . . weather (and global warming) permitting.
“As human beings we forget that we live on the third rock from the sun,” Williams had told me earlier that day. “But as far as I know, you can’t just walk around on Mars right now so this is the only home we have.” The dude who sprung “Happy” on the world was pretty worked up, you could say. Calling the song “a sarcastic postcard” to “the people in charge,” the multi-hyphenate artist let me in on his overall mood: “Content-wise, I don’t want to write about seemingly everyday song matters anymore. I wanted to actually take what I felt was emotionally jolting and jarring . . . ”
Jolting and jarring might be two words, all right, to describe the broader strokes of this past year. But what would be in my own postcard from 2017? It’s something I’ve been thinking about. In a 12-month span when so much happened — one in which Charles Manson died and Margaret Atwood ruled, the eclipse came and went, as did Sean Spicer — it can be hard to nail down a few pop-culture bullet points.
But, in the spirit of Pharrell, these were four pop moments to write home about and even possibly put in a safe:
1. Priciest painting in history
What’s better marketed than a Kardashian pregnancy? That would be the Salvator Mundi, a Leonardo da Vinci painting that brought in $450.3 million (U.S.) at Christie’s in November, the highest art price ever paid at auction.
Drawing many a side-eye from experts — such as the art adviser who told the New York Times that it was “a thumping epic triumph of branding and desire over connoisseurship and reality” — there was no lack of controversy about the only Leonardo said to be in private hands: the flatness of the canvas, the fit within Leonardo’s oeuvre, its complicated provenance.
One thing that I cannot dispute: the genius of Christie’s hype machine, which sent the painting on a presale world tour and fairy-dusted it with the moniker “the male Mona Lisa,” a tragicomic name that, to me, is like declaring something the “White Oprah” or the “Norwegian Edith Piaf.” Recently, news broke that the mystery buyer of the Salvator Mundi was none than Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and the painting will go up in the all-new Louvre in Abu Dhabi. An arty game-changer, indeed.
2. Spaghetti alla scandale
Of all the men jammed into the Gallery of Shame post-Weinstein this year, one that I found particularly interesting, from a pop vantage point, was the once Crocswearing, Vespa-riding Italian foodmeister whose personal fortune ranked at an estimated $25 million (thanks to his restaurants, cookbooks, cookware, TV and other business ventures).
Now accused of multiple incidents of harassment, Mario Batali was on the early wave of that thing we now take for granted, the “celebrity chef,” a concept that has only gone super gung-ho since the advent of the Food Network in the late ’90s.
Might we have been seeing the first significant puncture in the whole notion? For most of history, after all, chefs were journeymen of the kitchen, not cogs in the media machine.
It is, at the very least, a very picante cautionary tale with Batali being fired from his regular ABC show The
Chew and much of the industry distancing itself from him. (Re: the upcoming Eataly food emporium in Toronto, for instance, I was dutifully informed very recently that Batali has nothing to do with it.)
3. Harry (no, the other one)
2017, when everyone caught on to what Harry Styles groupies had known all along. Cutting the One Direction cord big-time and shoring up his own celebrity (nearly 23 million followers on Instagram), this was the year the cheeky Brit put out a No. 1 album, sold out two monster tours, held his own in the Christopher Nolan blockbuster Dunkirk and even displayed a contagious charm when he filled in recently for James Corden on The Late Late
Show. All this and the millennial heartthrob has managed that rare hat-trick: turning into a style icon. He owns the “floral suit,” for one, courtesy of his partnership with Gucci, a label, incidentally, that has broken the code for a certain maximalist esthetic, especially for younger fashionistas, via its newish designer Alessandro Michele.
Continuing its fever pitch, the Harry-friendly label reported an unreal 49-per-cent growth in the third fiscal quarter of the year, hitting $1.82 billion in cha-ching!
4. The Clooney twins
Call me old-fashioned, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to see George Clooney on nappies duty at 55. I’m still not.
As much as it’s only good form to cheer for the “just born” set, the slowly-but-surely daddyhood this past summer of Hollywood’s once most confirmed bachelor left those of us of who are non-breeders with one last champ on our side of the ledger.
In a world designed for families, you see, Clooney was our groovy patron saint for the childless, for years. And while it was one thing for him to marry the amazing Amal a while back, was procreation necessary too? Ah well: I guess I’ll have to suffice with childless poster-broads like Betty White (“the only problem with children is they grow up to be people and I just like animals better than people.”) Oh, and Ralph Fiennes and Jon Hamm and Cameron Diaz and Helen Mirren and Bradley Cooper. If Ellen and Portia end up adopting, I quit!