Rise of the trust fund kids who loaf, paint and write
JAMES Merrill was born rich “whether I liked it or not”. His father, Charles, who co-founded the bank Merrill Lynch, had given him a trust fund. It bought James time.
Free from the need to earn, he conducted seances with the spirit world and wrote poetry. In a new biography, Langdon Hammer describes how Merrill’s transcripts of 40 years of seances morphed into the great 560-page poem, The Changing Light at Sandover.
Merrill, who died in 1995, is an early example of what you might call an HNWI artist — after the wealth managers’ acronym for a “high net worth individual”.
HNWI art is going to become a lot more common.
That will help the next generation answer a pressing question: what to do with the growing tribe of HNWI heirs?
Art rarely pays, so each society has to find a way to fund artists. In the Middle Ages kings acted as patrons, and until the financial crisis, American universities routinely gave poets teaching jobs. And now we have the HNWI heirs.
Most HNWIs missed the crisis. Since 2008, their numbers have grown at a compound annual rate of 10%, according to Capgemini’s World Wealth Report. In 2013 there were 13.7-million HNWIs worldwide with assets of at least $1m. Of course, 90% of HNWIs are just scraping by — mere “millionaires next door” — with assets of only $1m-$5m, says Capgemini.
Still, if the average HNWI has two children, that still leaves several million heirs who won’t need to work for money. These people will need to answer the James Merrill question: what to do with all that education, ambition and time?
Previous generations didn’t have this problem. Historically, most HNWIs were aristocrats who considered activity vulgar. Revolutions helped winnow their tribe. Hefty inheritance taxes winnowed further.
But life, for now, is kinder to HNWIs, so their children therefore need to decide what to do.
And while few HNWI heirs are itching to wake up early and do boring entry-level jobs, some will devote their lives to philanthropy, and some will buy political office. Others will waste their lives like old-style aristos.
But most want high-status work that leaves scope for long holidays. Art is the obvious solution. Some HNWI heirs will become artistic patrons. Others will make bad art. A friend once asked the daughter of a famous European family the ultimate middle-class question: “What do you do?” She replied: “I make combustible art.”
She made sculptures, “then I burn them”.
But some HNWI art will be good. HNWI artists have time to hone their talent, and won’t dissipate it in hack work like us plebs.
When I joined the Financial Times as a graduate trainee in 1994, I was told somebody called Alain de Botton had been offered the same job the year before.
But De Botton — whose banker father left him a trust fund reportedly worth £200m — had decided to write books instead, and he did, several bestsellers.
American writer Andrew Solomon (whose father Howard was a pharmaceutical mogul) could afford to spend 11 years writing his book Far From the Tree.
Other contemporary HNWI artists include Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles, from an old banking family, and English novelist Edward St Aubyn, whose books recount an unhappy childhood on a big estate.
That will become a classic theme of HNWI art. This may seem to be a limitation. But when the educated middle classes dominated artistic production, they, too, left out most of life. George Orwell lamented the scarcity of “proletarian novels”.
De Botton notes that even middle-class working life rarely features in literature. Most characters “fall in love and have sex and ... never go to the office”, he complains. Being an HNWI with time to rectify these matters, De Botton visited many offices to research his book on work.
HNWI art has its drawbacks, but it will keep a lot of potentially dangerous people off the streets.