Art and the billionaire heirs

James Merrill was born rich, as he said, "whether I liked it or not". His father Charles, who co-founded the bank 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.

Most HNWIs missed the crisis. Since 2008, their numbers have grown at a compound annual rate of 10 per cent, according to Capgemini's World Wealth Report. In 2013, there were 13.7 million HNWIs worldwide with investable assets of at least $1m.

Of course, 90 per cent of HNWIs are just scraping by - mere "millionaires next door", with assets of only $1m-$5m, says Capgemini. Still, if the average HNWI has two children, then even factoring out humbler HNWIs, that still leaves several million heirs who won't need to work for money. These people will need to answer the James Merrill question: what to do with all that education, ambition and time? We will need to keep them occupied.

Previous generations didn't have this problem. Historically, most HNWIs were aristocrats who considered activity vulgar and, anyway, had a penchant for drinking their wealth. Frequent revolutions helped winnow their tribe: a Russian prince might end up driving a Parisian taxi. Hefty inheritance taxes winnowed further.

But, for now, life is kinder to HNWIs. Their children therefore need to decide what to do. One billionaire's son told me he saw no point in following his father into moneymaking. In fact, few HNWI heirs are itching to wake up early and do boring entry-level jobs. "Inherited wealth is a mixed blessing," billionaire philanthropist Sigrid Rausing told The Irish Times. "Unconsciously, it can feel like all types of professions are not for you."

Some HNWI heirs will devote their lives to philanthropy. However, this is usually a waste of time. It's smarter to donate to an existing charity (as Warren Buffett gives to the Gates Foundation) rather than setting up your own organisation that will need a learning curve and probably duplicate work that others do better.

Some HNWI heirs will buy political offices. Others will waste their lives like old-style aristos. But most want high-status work that leaves scope for long holidays. Art is the obvious solution.

Some HNWI heirs will become artistic patrons. Rhapsody, the literary magazine for United Airlines' first-class and business passengers, is a mechanism for converting HNWI wealth into fees for serious writers.

Other HNWI heirs will make bad art. A friend once asked the daughter of a famous European family the ultimate middle-class question: "What do you do?" She replied: "I make combustible art." "Err, what?" asked my friend. "I make sculptures," she explained, "then I burn them." "I'd like to see some one day," he said politely. "You can't," she replied patiently. "I burn them."

But some HNWI art will be good. HNWI artists have time to hone their talent, and won't dissipate it in hack work like us plebs. When I joined the FT as a graduate trainee in 1994, I was told that somebody called Alain de Botton had been offered the same job the year before. But De Botton - whose banker father left him a trust fund reportedly worth £200m - had decided to write books instead. He insists he never touched his dad's money. Still, it presumably made artistic life feel secure.

Similarly, American writer Andrew Solomon (whose ultra-HNWI father Howard was a pharmaceutical mogul) could afford to spend 11 years writing his book Far From the Tree. Other contemporary HNWI artists include Brazilian film-maker Walter Salles, from an old banking family, and posh English novelist Edward St Aubyn. His books recount an unhappy childhood on a big estate. That will become a classic theme of HNWI art. This may seem a limitation. But when the educated middle classes dominated artistic production, they, too, left out most of life. George Orwell lamented the scarcity of "proletarian novels". De Botton notes that even middle-class working life rarely features in literature. Most literary characters, he complains, "fall in love and have sex and . . . never go to the office". Being a HNWI with time to rectify these matters, De Botton visited many offices to research his book on work. HNWI art has its drawbacks. But it will keep a lot of potentially dangerous people off the streets.

[email protected]; Twitter @KuperSimon

Illustration by Luis Granena

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