A hundred years since her birth, and we are still pawing through Marilyn Monroe’s wardrobe like grave robbers at a pharaoh’s tomb. The recent auction of her gowns and cosmetics is not a celebration of life but a testament to our cultural decay. We live in an age of intellectual decadence, where the artifacts of a troubled starlet are treated with more reverence than the ideas of our greatest thinkers.
The Victorians at least had the decency to bury their dead and move on. We, by contrast, have turned Monroe into a secular saint, her lipstick tubes and silk dresses lifted to the altar of a religion without a god. This is what happens when a civilisation loses its sense of history: it fixates on the glittering surface of the past while ignoring the substance.
Monroe herself, a woman of tragic intelligence, would have laughed at the absurdity of it all. And then she would have sold you the comb she used to brush her hair, for a price that would feed a village for a year. The auction is a mirror of our own hollow souls.
