美国国家公共电台 NPR Don't Be Fooled: 'Generation Wealth' Is More About Wanting Than Having

 

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

Plastic, surgery, private jets, toddlers in designer clothes, magnums of champagne¹ served by costumed fairies who fly through the air - looking through the 500-page book "Generation Wealth," you see all of that. It's a new collection of photographs by Lauren Greenfield. And it's not just pictures of people who are wealthy. It's people who want to be wealthy - a homeless woman with her knockoff Louis Vuitton purse, gang members with diamond and platinum² grills³.

This is Lauren (laughter).

LAUREN GREENFIELD: Hi.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Hi.

GREENFIELD: Nice to meet you.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Nice to meet you.

(CROSSTALK)

GREENFIELD: OK, great. Let me just...

MCEVERS: I met up with Greenfield at the Annenberg Space for Photography here in Los Angeles, where there is an exhibit to accompany the new book. And she says some of her early work was photographing kids here in LA where she grew up. And this project about wealth and striving for wealth just developed from there even though she didn't know it was about that at the time.

GREENFIELD: I started it as a kind of looking back at the culture that I grew up in. And then I went on to do other things about gender⁵, about fashion, about consumerism, about how our values were exported. And it wasn't until the 2008 financial crash I realized that the stories that I had been doing for a couple of decades were all connected and kind of formed a morality tale.

And so I started a process of going back and going forward, going back and looking through all my old work and seeing how the pieces of the puzzle fit together, what I had missed and also making new work that filled out this picture that I was starting to see about what it all added up to.

MCEVERS: What it added up to is this massive collection of images organized into sections with titles like "I Shop Therefore I Am" and "The Princess Brand." It's in chronological⁶ order, and at the exhibit, we start in the early '90s with images of private school kids, seventh graders, each flashing a hundred-dollar bill. If you're going to do a story about growing up in LA, they told Lauren Greenfield, you have to show money. Then there's the photo of high school kids who've skipped school to cruise the beach in their convertibles⁷. And Greenfield says these kids aren't rich.

GREENFIELD: I mean the thing about this project is it's not about the rich. It's really about our aspiration⁸ to wealth and our kind of needing to show that off whether we have it or not. So with the rich kids, I was kind of looking at how they were growing up quickly and how they were influenced by the values of Hollywood. But they were really influenced by the media and kind of MTV and hip-hop and looking to gangster⁹ culture and hip-hop culture for inspiration. And so then I also photographed kids from East LA and South LA who, on the other side, were emulating¹⁰ the trappings of wealth.

MCEVERS: It's like a feedback loop, she says. The rich kids want to look like the poor kids, and the poor kids want to look like the rich kids. We look at another picture of a kid in a pinstriped suit and a rose boutonniere paying for a limo outside his prom date's house.

GREENFIELD: Enrique was living in South Central. His mother was a seamstress. And he spent two years saving the $600 that he spent on prom. And his mother thought money could go to better use, but that - she knew how important it was to him. And he said it was completely worth it. They had a limo. It picked them up in South Central. Everybody was looking. And he said he felt like the king that day.

MCEVERS: Yeah.

GREENFIELD: So I think it's really important to understand that these values go beyond the rich. They go beyond the poor. They kind of cross class and race and even border.

MCEVERS: All right, let's keep walking. Oh, yeah.

There's a section in the exhibit called "The Queen Of Versailles" about a wealthy couple that builds this huge mansion¹¹, a section called "Cult⁴ Of Celebrity¹²" with early images of the Kardashians. I mean this is Greenfield capturing famous people learning how to be famous.

GREENFIELD: Fame has been an important driver in the work and the rise of fame. And with the rise of reality TV and the rise of social media, everybody can be a celebrity, and fame has currency. And so in a lot of my interviews, when you ask kids what they want to be when they grow up, they say rich and famous.

MCEVERS: A theme that seems to emerge a lot, too, in your work is that people will pay money and want to acquire money to look like and have the trappings of having money.

GREENFIELD: Exactly. There's a lot of fake it till you make it. Future the rapper says fake it till you make it. Kingpin (ph), a rap promoter, says playing the role is as important as being the role.

MCEVERS: You know, there's all these pictures of people at pool parties and other sections - you know, champagne and all this stuff. Like, in some ways, they look like they're having a really good time. Did you get a sense that these people are happy?

GREENFIELD: Well, David Siegel from "The Queen Of Versailles" had a great quote when he said, money doesn't make you happy. It just makes you unhappy in a better section of town.

MCEVERS: (Laughter).

GREENFIELD: You know, there's a striving that kind of continues among the rich. And "Queen Of Versailles" was a perfect example. They lived in a 26,000-square-foot house and then built a 90,000-square-foot house. So that is just kind of the best example of it never being enough. There's kind of a theme of addiction¹³ and the addiction of consumerism. And so with addiction, you never have enough, and there's no satisfaction. And eventually you hit rock bottom.

MCEVERS: Which brings us to a section called "The Fall" where Lauren Greenfield captures the damage done by the 2008 economic crash. The pictures are different here. There are no pool parties. This is wealth pursued and taken away, people who reached up and discovered they reached too far.

GREENFIELD: From Chuck, a GM worker who is in foreclosure and lost his job when the GM factory left town, to Jenny, who was a real estate agent, very successful in the crash, bought a house, built a pool and then lost it to foreclosure and had to turn to phone sex because it was the only job she could do at home where she wouldn't take her truck out and fear having her truck be repossessed.

MCEVERS: Wow.

GREENFIELD: This is an empty home where the child's trophies¹⁴ were all left in the garage.

MCEVERS: The exhibit ends with a section called "Make It Rain" - dollar bills floating down on naked women who crawl on the floor and pick them up at a famous strip club in Atlanta, a T-shirt that says being broke is not an option. And Greenfield says now, decades after she started taking these pictures, projecting wealth is more important than ever.

GREENFIELD: I think the backdrop of these 25 years is that we've never had more inequality, and we've never had less social mobility¹⁵. So in a way, fictitious¹⁶ social mobility, bling and presentation, has replaced real social mobility.

MCEVERS: Right because it's all you can get.

GREENFIELD: Because it's all you can get. And there's - you know, I've kind of looked at this shift in our values where we've gone from kind of the Protestant ethic¹⁷ of hard work and thrift¹⁸ and frugality¹⁹ and modesty²⁰ to a culture of bling and showing off and narcissism²¹. And there is this kind of elevation²² of materialism²³ that's almost like the new spirituality.

MCEVERS: Lauren Greenfield, thank you so much.

GREENFIELD: Thank you.

MCEVERS: This has been really, really interesting.

GREENFIELD: Thanks for doing it.

MCEVERS: Lauren Greenfield's book is called "Generation Wealth." The exhibit is up at LA's Annenberg Space for Photography through August 13.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE SHINS SONG, "PINK BULLETS")

1 champagne   

n.香槟酒；微黄色

参考例句：

• There were two glasses of champagne on the tray.托盘里有两杯香槟酒。
• They sat there swilling champagne.他们坐在那里大喝香槟酒。

2 platinum   

n.白金

参考例句：

• I'll give her a platinum ring.我打算送给她一枚白金戒指。
• Platinum exceeds gold in value.白金的价值高于黄金。

3 grills   

n.烤架( grill的名词复数 )；（一盘）烤肉；格板；烧烤餐馆v.烧烤( grill的第三人称单数 )；拷问，盘问

参考例句：

• Backyard barbecue grills could be proscribed. 里弄烤肉店会被勒令停业的。 来自辞典例句
• Both side inlets have horizontal grills and incorporate impressive fog lamps. 两侧进气口的水平烤架并纳入令人印象深刻的雾灯。 来自互联网

4 cult   

n.异教，邪教；时尚，狂热的崇拜

参考例句：

• Her books aren't bestsellers,but they have a certain cult following.她的书算不上畅销书，但有一定的崇拜者。
• The cult of sun worship is probably the most primitive one.太阳崇拜仪式或许是最为原始的一种。

5 gender   

n.（生理上的）性，（名词、代词等的）性

参考例句：

• French differs from English in having gender for all nouns.法语不同于英语，所有的名词都有性。
• Women are sometimes denied opportunities solely because of their gender.妇女有时仅仅因为性别而无法获得种种机会。

6 chronological   

adj.按年月顺序排列的，年代学的

参考例句：

• The paintings are exhibited in chronological sequence.这些画是按创作的时间顺序展出的。
• Give me the dates in chronological order.把日期按年月顺序给我。

7 convertibles   

n.可改变性，可变化性( convertible的名词复数 )；活动顶篷式汽车

参考例句：

• In Washington, the regulators did make a push to ban the manufacturing of convertibles. 华盛顿的各个管制机构曾经推动禁止敝篷车的制造。 来自辞典例句
• That's why they drive around in half-million-dollar convertibles? 因此他们就不惜花几千万美元来这里居住？ 来自电影对白

8 aspiration   

n.志向，志趣抱负；渴望；(语)送气音；吸出

参考例句：

• Man's aspiration should be as lofty as the stars.人的志气应当象天上的星星那么高。
• Young Addison had a strong aspiration to be an inventor.年幼的爱迪生渴望成为一名发明家。

9 gangster   

n.匪徒，歹徒，暴徒

参考例句：

• The gangster's friends bought off the police witness.那匪徒的朋友买通了警察方面的证人。
• He is obviously a gangster,but he pretends to be a saint.分明是强盗，却要装圣贤。

10 emulating   

v.与…竞争( emulate的现在分词 )；努力赶上；计算机程序等仿真；模仿

参考例句：

• The possibilities of producing something entirely new by emulating nature's very wide crosses are enticing. 用自然界的非常广泛的杂交方法创造出全新植物种的可能性是诱人的。 来自辞典例句
• The human emulating this archetypal patterning will be quite the accomplished businessperson. 这类原型模式者会是一个很成功的商人。 来自互联网

11 mansion   

n.大厦，大楼；宅第

参考例句：

• The old mansion was built in 1850.这座古宅建于1850年。
• The mansion has extensive grounds.这大厦四周的庭园广阔。

12 celebrity   

n.名人，名流；著名，名声，名望

参考例句：

• Tom found himself something of a celebrity. 汤姆意识到自己已小有名气了。
• He haunted famous men, hoping to get celebrity for himself. 他常和名人在一起, 希望借此使自己获得名气。

13 addiction   

n.上瘾入迷，嗜好

参考例句：

• He stole money from his parents to feed his addiction.他从父母那儿偷钱以满足自己的嗜好。
• Areas of drug dealing are hellholes of addiction,poverty and murder.贩卖毒品的地区往往是吸毒上瘾、贫困和发生谋杀的地方。

14 trophies   

n.（为竞赛获胜者颁发的）奖品( trophy的名词复数 )；奖杯；（尤指狩猎或战争中获得的）纪念品；（用于比赛或赛跑名称）奖

参考例句：

• His football trophies were prominently displayed in the kitchen. 他的足球奖杯陈列在厨房里显眼的位置。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The hunter kept the lion's skin and head as trophies. 这猎人保存狮子的皮和头作为纪念品。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》

15 mobility   

n.可动性，变动性，情感不定

参考例句：

• The difference in regional house prices acts as an obstacle to mobility of labour.不同地区房价的差异阻碍了劳动力的流动。
• Mobility is very important in guerrilla warfare.机动性在游击战中至关重要。

16 fictitious   

adj.虚构的，假设的；空头的

参考例句：

• She invented a fictitious boyfriend to put him off.她虚构出一个男朋友来拒绝他。
• The story my mother told me when I was young is fictitious.小时候妈妈对我讲的那个故事是虚构的。

17 ethic   

n.道德标准，行为准则

参考例句：

• They instilled the work ethic into their children.他们在孩子们的心中注入了职业道德的理念。
• The connotation of education ethic is rooted in human nature's mobility.教育伦理的内涵根源于人本性的变动性。

18 thrift   

adj.节约，节俭；n.节俭，节约

参考例句：

• He has the virtues of thrift and hard work.他具备节俭和勤奋的美德。
• His thrift and industry speak well for his future.他的节俭和勤勉预示着他美好的未来。

19 frugality   

n.节约，节俭

参考例句：

• We must build up our country with industry and frugality.我们必须勤俭建国。
• By frugality she managed to get along on her small salary.凭着节俭，她设法以自己微薄的薪水生活。

20 modesty   

n.谦逊，虚心，端庄，稳重，羞怯，朴素

参考例句：

• Industry and modesty are the chief factors of his success.勤奋和谦虚是他成功的主要因素。
• As conceit makes one lag behind,so modesty helps one make progress.骄傲使人落后，谦虚使人进步。

21 narcissism   

n.自我陶醉，自恋

参考例句：

• Those who suffer from narcissism become self-absorbed.自恋的人会变得自私。
• The collective narcissism of the Kerouac circle is ultimately boring.凯鲁亚克和他周围人物的集体自我陶醉欲最终使人厌烦不已。

22 elevation   

n.高度；海拔；高地；上升；提高

参考例句：

• The house is at an elevation of 2,000 metres.那幢房子位于海拔两千米的高处。
• His elevation to the position of General Manager was announced yesterday.昨天宣布他晋升总经理职位。

23 materialism   

n.［哲］唯物主义，唯物论；物质至上

参考例句：

• Idealism is opposite to materialism.唯心论和唯物论是对立的。
• Crass materialism causes people to forget spiritual values.极端唯物主义使人忘掉精神价值。