Disgustingly Wealthy: on Lauren Greenfield’s “Generation Wealth”
Greenfield’s eye-opening exhibit reveals the horrors of wealth in a way the documentary version cannot.
On March 8, while viewing documentary photographer Lauren Greenfield’s “Generation Wealth” exhibit, then housed in the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, I found I had never been so engrossed by a set of stories. That quiet, rainy Sunday afternoon in Copenhagen, Denmark my sister — and frequent collaborator — Temishi (temishi.com) and I found tourists and Danes alike crowding the large photo displays set against tall white walls in the small, gorgeous museum just outside the city.
I was spending my early-March Spring Break with my sister who was studying abroad in Copenhagen. Things were mostly calm then, though there was a lingering sense of uncertainty throughout the trip as coronavirus seemed more serious than had been previously communicated. By the end of that week, Temi’s academic program would be cancelled, museums would close, and so would everything else, and governments around the world would urge citizens to stay inside. That day though, my only concern was Greenfield’s exhibit. While writing this, I learned March 8 was actually the last day of the exhibit at Louisiana, making our viewing that much more salient; Temi says it was “Meant to be.”
It must have been. I initially came to Greenfield’s “Generation Wealth” a few months before through the exhibit’s documentary. Where the exhibit tells hundreds of stories about the experiences of wealth across the world, Generation Wealth (2018) closely follows a select few of her work’s subjects. Viewers get an ultimately sympathetic view of her subject’s motivations, desires, and experiences with having and chasing wealth, and even learn about Greenfield herself. The documentary makes clear that the documentarian loves her family and her work, and the exhibit and film are composed of the photos she has taken throughout her career, now tied together by how society experiences — reveres, is devastated by — wealth.
The real and imagined lives of the uber-rich and famous has always fascinated me and growing up I couldn’t help but indulge in fictional accounts of the young rich. Young Adult fiction writers such as Melissa de la Cruz and Melody Mayer wrote of teenage girls working in the alluring world of the wealthy as au pairs and nannies, while Lauren Conrad captured the ups and downs of young women chasing fame through reality television, drawing from her own experiences as a reality star on The Hills. The sexy, scandalous, shocking world created in Cecily von Ziegesar’s Gossip Girl was as fun to read then as it is to watch now. But beneath the careless glamour was an underlying depravity, a hint of something missing. When the initial magic of what wealth could bring wore off, the rich always seemed a bit sad.
Reality offered as many avenues for observation as books. Dylan Nelson’s and Dan Sturmans’s 2010 documentary The Hollywood Complex — which can only be described as zany — examined the star-obsessed city and the families who flocked to it in hopes of attaining wealth and fame. Similar goals held true on Toddlers and Tiaras, where overzealous mothers (usually) pushed their young daughters (usually) to win beauty pageants for cash prizes, fame, or both — a show I guiltily indulged in for hours as a teen. As both Greenfield’s documentary and exhibition show, we often still chase wealth, or at least possess a fascination with those who have or want it. We cannot help but watch, and it seems our fascination predates our modern time.
In the exhibit, we, my own party, but also everyone in each of the exhibit’s four rooms it seems, viewed every photo and read each caption in earnest. The stories they told spanned decades, capturing the youth culture of Los Angeles in the 90s, the Recession era of the late noughties, the lives of the openly famous and quietly wealthy — and those working to be one or the other. Some stories were hopeful, like that of the former Wall Street executive, whose epiphany about his own ingratitude over what he had led him to start a foundation. Others felt tragic, like that of the mother whose quest to gain the ‘perfect body’ forced her to debt — holding that her young daughter seeing her mother feel good about her own body would in turn help her daughter feel better about her own looks.
After a while though, the stories Greenfield’s subjects shared became harder to read. As we had initially walked through the museum toward the exhibit, Temi had said, “All of my friends who saw it came away feeling disgusted.” I had been surprised. If the documentary’s end did not feel explicitly hopeful, it at least offered a sense of resolution. The fugitive hedge fund manager realized money was not everything. The once eager-to-be-a-millionaire laughed at the things he had once wanted and felt content with what he had. The former adult film star struggled to return to normal life but claimed to be happier in it than she had been chasing wealth and fame through sex work.
But “Generation Wealth” leaves its viewers with no such calm, with the depth of our society’s materialism inescapable. In the fourth and final room of the exhibit were stories of excessive and extravagant Russian and Chinese wealth; the devastation of the 2008 Market Crash on middle-class families in Ireland and Iceland, as well as of expats in Dubai. Indeed, amid heartbreaking stories of families who had lost everything in search of more and of infuriating tales of families with more than most would ever have, we found we were thoroughly disgusted.
But it was a disgust tinged with sadness, and even confusion. We left the exhibit wondering why and how society had gotten to the point of such excessive materialism, both angry with and saddened by the stories Greenfield told. One could be upset with the individuals for their greed, and yet each person seemed at once a perpetrator and a victim of a pervasive culture that so values things. The disgust could also be a product of medium; if a documentary may strive to deliver a story that feels resolved upon completion, an exhibit has no such luxury — the cumulative experience will give each viewer a multitude of complex takeaways without offering one final interpretation.
The brilliance of the exhibit lies in that open-endedness. Without calling attention to any one specific issue under our culture’s obsessive consumption, Greenfield touches on all of them — the commodification of bodies, particularly women’s; the implications of race on class and wealth; and the ways in which wealth has been increasingly tied to society’s values and cultural identity. Through Greenfield’s sharp eye, viewers find that nearly every part of culture, especially American culture, is colored by an insatiable greed and want — an endless culture of consumption for the sake of consuming.
