James Merrill was born rich, as he said, “whether I liked it or not”. His father Charles, who co-founded brokerage firm Merrill Lynch, had given him a trust fund. It bought James time. Free from the need to earn, he conducted seances with the spirit world and wrote poetry. In a new biography, Langdon Hammer describes how Merrill’s transcripts of 40 years of seances morphed into the great 560-page poem, “The Changing Light at Sandover”.
Merrill, who died in 1995, is an early example of what you might call a HNWI artist (after the wealth managers’ acronym for “high net worth individual”). HNWI art is going to become much more common. That will help the next generation answer a pressing question: what to do with the growing tribe of HNWI heirs?
Because art rarely pays, each society has to find a way to fund artists. In the Middle Ages, kings acted as patrons. Until the financial crisis, American universities routinely gave poets teaching jobs. And now we have HNWI heirs.