What Befits a King: The Moral Aesthetics of Gold

But that’s the thing about gold. The human desire for its sparkle has never been a question of need, only want. 

-Julia Carrie Wong

I’ve been thinking a lot about gold recently, and it’s not my fault. 

The Trump administration has caused untold political upheaval, and there’s the aesthetic one.. Journalists, commentators, and pundits have been obsessively writing about the blingification of the Oval Office. Every gold trophy on the mantel or whisper of gold filigree on the wall is an opportunity for a new opinion piece. Whether it’s symbolic of fascism, kingly aspiration, or just childish tastes, everyone seems to agree that it’s not a good look.

I find myself nodding along with these pieces. They feed me with a sense of self-satisfaction, almost a sense of schadenfreude: gold is finally getting what it deserves. 

Then I started to wonder: what’s my issue with gold? 

I mean, what did it ever do to me?

So we know that there is a strong correlation between frequent exposure and aesthetic appreciation. It’s a kind of sad fact that if you see something enough, the next time you see it, you’re going to like it, just a little bit more.  My husband can fight Sabrina Carpenter all he wants, but I know if I just play it one more time.  Yes, we know that exposure affects our aesthetic judgment, but we also know context matters; the conditions in which you experience something affect how you feel about that thing (think Pavlov’s dogs.)

So it begs the question, what did gold ever do to me, really? It turns out alot.

Aesthetic Genealogy: Skin Suffocation, Spoiled Children and of Course the SS.

My earliest exposure to gold was through the violent slasher flick and the delightful children’s classic, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, based on Roald Dahl’s book about virtue and the children who lack it. In the 1971 movie, the very spoiled Verucha Salt throws a tantrum because she wants the goose that lays the golden egg, but instead of getting one, she is plunged down the incineration chute. In that fairly traumatizing scene, I was exposed to golden eggs, yes, but also greed and the violent death of a child. (In the original book, it’s a walnut-shucking squirrel that Verucha covets, but that’s a bit of a hard sell.)

Thinking back to Verucha’s Demise reminded me of the opening scenes of 1964’s Goldfinger, in which, while Bond searches for a bottle of Champagne, his lover is painted from head to toe in gold paint that literally suffocates her.  The resulting image is both beautiful and enticing, yet horrible. Is it strange to say that one of my first fears was of accidentally being suffocated by gold leaf? Given the continuous online speculation that the original actress, Shirley Eaton, died while filming that scene. Of course, not true, but gold used where gold shouldn’t be leaves us in an uncanny place. 

By the way the villain of Goldfinger spends a good part of the movie obsessed with retrieving Another box ticked, if the Nazi’s loved gold it just cant be good.

Gold Revalued:

The question I asked myself is, can I recondition my response to gold? In other words, reset an aesthetic bias.

So then, how do we understand gold and the aesthetics of gold when pop culture, mass market film, and even children’s literature equate gold with the morally abject? Is it possible to ever value gold, give our attention to gold, find pleasure in gold, without feeling a twinge of shame? 

So I decided to do a little exercise and make a list of all things blingy that appealed to me, and not only was I able to find a new appreciation for things of the gold persuasion, but I also learned a few things about what makes gold so alluring.  i

Three Ways Gold Really Shines:

1. Think of Gold like the 8-Year-Old You. I remember once as a child, gathering shards of blue crystal glass from the site of a car break-in and tying it in a makeshift bag to place in a box under my bed. Children do this all the time. They collect glittery, golden things and diamonds disguised as shards of glass, creating talismanic objects out of everyday detritus. As Linda Sexson writes in her essay Boxes: Improvising the Sacred “Children collect feathers, hide gold paper, delicately perch a marble in the arms of an unresisting house plant, or stick shells under their beds or stones in their mattresses? The “junk “ that is precious to children—and to adults—is precisely the stuff of the sacred.”

2. All the Gold We Cannot See. In France, the recent discovery of the golden owl brought to a close a 30-year-old treasure hunt, inspiring both delight and disappointment. Recently, in Virginia, a city gardener discovered a stash of Civil War-era coins and relics that a children’s history book author had hidden. The world’s just a bit more exciting when an everyday walk in that park can lead to the discovery of treasure. Gold might be at its most alluring when it’s hidden from us.

3. The Golden Touch. I remember visiting the Golden Temple in Kyoto, and although I don’t recall the temple itself, I vividly remember a matcha ice cream cone I had there with just a touch of gold flakes on top. That pinch of gold powder was enough to overtake my memory of the temple itself. Gold is at its best when it’s just almost not there. I once watched a Kintsugi workshop at CASICA  in Tokyo. Women came to the store—yes, it was all women—with shards of their favorite teapots, bowls, or even ceramic figurines, and for an afternoon, they repaired them using a mixture of gold and glue to reassemble them. Making something the same yet entirely other, something not better but different from what it was before. I witnessed gold as a way of rebuilding the mundane into the magnificent. 

It's Not About the Gold:

I started this post thinking it would be about the moral implications of gold, a topic that had been highlighted in the articles I had been reading about the Oval Office, but ended up questioning and, in some ways, tackling my own aesthetic biases and how they were formed. In the end, I reminded myself just how much there was to appreciate about gold. It even made me less unhappy with the Oval Office. Well, it’s decor at least.