Views expressed in opinion columns are the author’s own.
A British auction house recently sold a collection of objects owned by Stephen Hawking, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton. The collection included Hawking’s PhD thesis, an autographed letter from Darwin defending natural selection and an autographed manuscript where Einstein reflects on tolerance and fascism. It also included one of Stephen Hawking’s old wheelchairs.
It’s human nature to attach value to objects. We associate things with the memories and emotions they invoke; a neural connection may fire when we pick up our childhood toy and remember the times we spent playing with our old friends.
But why do we place the same type of value on an object that was simply owned by someone famous? Giving value to an object and auctioning it off just because it belonged to a late celebrity not only feels like a waste of money; it’s also downright disrespectful. Hawking’s chair was sold for 296,750 pounds, the second-highest price for any object in the 52-item collection — which included many of his personal letters and scientific works.
The issue can take an even darker turn in cases like that of George Zimmerman, the man who fatally shot Trayvon Martin and was subsequently acquitted of all charges. Zimmerman held an auction in 2016 to sell the gun that he’d used to kill Martin. The reported final selling price was $250,000. The model is usually sold for around $200, but someone’s morbid fascination with the case apparently made this particular gun worth a lot more.
This trend indicates a deeper issue with celebrity culture and the way we view fame. Some people become so involved in the lives of stars that they can develop something called celebrity worship syndrome, an obsessive addictive disorder characterized by extreme interest in a celebrity’s personal life.
The phenomenon extends to even more bizarre items: A piece of gum allegedly chewed by Britney Spears reportedly sold on eBay for $14,000, and a tissue used by Scarlett Johansson fetched $5,300 at an auction back in 2008.
Society treats famous people as points of fascination rather than actual people. The death of a loved one is a devastating tragedy to their friends and family, but on a true crime television show like Forensic Files or Dateline, it’s prime-time entertainment. A spotlight is placed on celebrities; someone is watching them every time they blow their nose or spit out a piece of gum, as if even their simplest actions transcend those of the regular person.
Lucy Hawking, Stephen Hawking’s daughter, reportedly said that the auction gave “admirers of his work the chance to acquire a memento of our father’s extraordinary life in the shape of a small selection of evocative and fascinating items.” The chance to read the thoughts of a brilliant mind responsible for breathtaking scientific discoveries is what I would call evocative and fascinating. The chance to look at his old wheelchair — not so much.
Alyssa McKinney is a sophomore electrical engineering major. She can be reached at alyssa.cmck@gmail.com.
