They say you can measure a civilisation by its decadence. If that is true, we are now hurtling toward a collapse that will make the fall of Rome look like a minor property dispute. This week, London hosted the Marilyn Monroe Centenary Auction, a grotesque carnival where her iconic gowns and make-up fetched millions. Seven million pounds for a dress she wore less than two hours. Seven million for a comb laden with her DNA. The bidding was frenzied, the buyers anonymous, and the symbolism as subtle as a sledgehammer.
Let us be honest: Marilyn was a great actress. She understood her craft, her comedic timing was impeccable, and her vulnerability on screen was genuinely affecting. But she was also a manufactured product, a carefully curated projection of male fantasy and studio avarice. To deify her artefacts a century after her birth is to indulge in the same mawkish sentimentality that has crippled our culture. We are not honouring her memory. We are pickling a corpse.
Consider the historical parallels. The Victorians had their own obsession with the dead. They photographed corpses, wore mourning jewellery, and preserved locks of hair in lockets. But at least they had the decency to do so privately, within the confines of family grief. This auction was a public orgy of nostalgia, a transparent attempt to buy a piece of a myth that never truly existed. The buyers, I suspect, are not fans. They are collectors of cultural relics, hoarding them like dragons sitting on gold. They understand that value is not about art or history. It is about scarcity and the illusion of connection.
And what a connection it is. The money spent on that dress could fund a dozen arts programmes for underprivileged children. It could feed a small town. Instead, it will sit in a climate-controlled vault, never to be worn or touched, a monument to our collective inability to create anything new. We have reached the apex of intellectual decadence: we cannot produce new myths, so we vampirically feed on the old ones.
The make-up lot was particularly telling. Bidders were not just buying cosmetics. They were buying the fantasy of touching Marilyn’s skin, of being close to her perfection. It is the same impulse that drives people to buy petrified saints’ fingers or splinters of the True Cross. We have secularised our religion but kept the craving for relics. And like all relics, these items are worthless in any meaningful sense. They are objects that acquire value only through shared delusion.
I am not immune to nostalgia. I remember watching Some Like It Hot as a child and being captivated by Monroe’s charisma. But nostalgia is a form of blindness. It allows us to ignore the present’s failures by glorifying the past. The Monroe auction is a symptom of a culture that has given up on the future. We no longer dream of progress, of new art, of new ideas. We ransack the attics of history, hoping to find enough stardust to disguise our own emptiness.
What would Monroe have thought? She was a woman who struggled with fame, who wanted to be taken seriously as an actress. This auction reduces her to a commodity, reinforcing the very objectification she fought against. The irony is enough to make you weep. But the bidders are not weeping. They are counting their winnings, secure in the knowledge that they have purchased a piece of immortality.
This is not about Marilyn. It is about us. Our age is defined by a profound lack of cultural confidence. We cannot create. We cannot innovate. We can only consume the remains of a more fertile era. The Monroe auction is the starkest proof yet that we are living in the twilight of the West, a last gasp of a civilisation that mistakes its junk for treasures.
So yes, sell the dress. Sell the make-up. But do not pretend it is art. It is the final act of a culture that has lost its nerve, a culture that would rather worship a dead goddess than create a living one. The Victorians at least built railways and cathedrals. We build auction rooms and call it culture. Rome fell because it forgot how to dream. We are dreamlessly bidding on its ashes.
