Jensen Huang's black Tom Ford leather jacket sold for nearly a million dollars at Sotheby's this week. The same auction house that posted record half-year results. The same week the Rijksmuseum is mobilizing major de Kooning loans for a homecoming blockbuster. These are not two different markets. They are the same market operating on a newly expanded definition of what counts as a relic.
The Sympathy Machine: From Painter to CEO
What Sotheby's sold was not a jacket. It was contact with power. The same logic that makes a de Kooning canvas worth tens of millions because his hand moved across it makes Huang's jacket worth a million because his body inhabited it. Anthropologists call this contagious magic. Tom Sachs, in conversation with Culture Slop, called it sympathetic magic: the belief that an object touched by greatness carries that greatness forward. The distinction between art market and celebrity memorabilia market has collapsed, and Sotheby's is the institution profiting most cleanly from that collapse.
What This Says About the New Status Economy
The de Kooning story is also about national identity: a painter returning, symbolically, to the Netherlands. The Huang jacket story is about a different kind of national myth, the Silicon Valley founder as culture hero whose personal objects are worth institutionalizing. A 2022 paper in Poetics by Wesley Shrum found that the consecration of objects from technology figures follows the same sociological pattern as the consecration of artworks, with auction houses functioning as the primary legitimating institution in both cases. What has changed is the speed. De Kooning's market took decades to crystallize. Huang's took one product cycle.