Remember when we were all going to live in the metaverse? Of course you don’t, because who would want to? Mark Zuckerberg may have invested $80bn in the project over the past five years, but Horizon Worlds – the virtual reality playground where the Zuck was convinced we’d all want to spend our time – is shutting down, so if you want to visit a virtual ghost town, you’d better get in quick.
Our would-be tech overlords wish to convince us that what all of us agree is real hardly matters: but time and again we get proof that it does, and not just because the metaverse is headed down the tubes. Take the case of late Jim Irsay, billionaire owner of the Indianapolis Colts American football team – who was also one of the US’s great collectors. Manuscripts, sports memorabilia, music memorabilia, historical artefacts: Irsay had them all. He died last year at the age of 65 and his family decided to give new life to the treasures he had amassed by putting them up for auction. One tranche went to the block in March, and if you remember reading back in the spring about the most expensive guitar ever sold, you were reading about Irsay: David Gilmour’s “Black Strat” went for an unprecedented $14.6m (£10.9m). The total from the March sale was a staggering $94,484,903.
Today, a few days before the United States celebrates its 250th birthday, more astonishing items can be yours if the price is right, many of them connected to the nation’s story. The first official facsimile of the original signed manuscript of the Declaration of Independence is available if you have a few million bucks lying around. I myself was taken with an Abraham Lincoln fence rail cane: a souvenir in support of the 16th president’s election campaign of 1860, made from one the wooden rails he’d split as a young man in Illinois. Do I have $10,000 to spare? I’ll get back to you. Abe’s own pocket knife is up for grabs, as are, more morbidly, a couple of tickets to Ford’s Theater the night Lincoln was assassinated.
In thinking about where such objects might end up, it’s worth remarking that Irsay was not a hoarder of these treasures. He often lent them to museums and non-profit organisations. He took a travelling museum around the country so his fellow citizens could experience history up close and personal, and would refer to himself as the “steward” of the collection, rather than its “owner”.
One of the items in the collection with the highest estimate this time round is far more modern than anything linked to the nation’s founding. On offer is the original working manuscript of Alcoholics Anonymous, put together in 1939 by William Griffith “Bill” Wilson and Henry Giffen “Hank” Parkhurst; it is heavily edited and annotated with notes from other AA members and early religious and medical readers. It is estimated to go for up to $2m – less than that Declaration, sure, but still a remarkable sum. I’m not surprised, however. Not long ago Tom Hanks, appearing on The Rest Is History podcast, said he felt a great untold story, cinematically speaking, was that of the founding and development of AA. It is the world’s largest recovery support service and has helped tens of millions of people since its founding in 1935.
What does this prove? Why do we care? Because what truly creates and preserves our collective memory is not and can never be virtual. We want to hold it in our hands – or at least look at it in a glass case – and know: that was there then, this is here now. Time collapses, the present is the past, and we are all somehow the same real human beings. No plastic headset is ever going to offer that.
Photographs by Valérie Macon/AFP via Getty Images, Christie’s
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