All that glitters

Contemplating gold, billionaires, and how quickly our money can vanish, at the Brooklyn Museum.

Zadik Zadikian’s “Path to Nine,” not made of solid gold, is one of the best parts of the Brooklyn Museum’s “Solid Gold.”

Gold is timeless. Gold is precious. Gold is so hot right now, as we watch a trade war vaporize our more modern forms of money.

What serendipitous timing for the Brooklyn Museum, which is currently promoting a huge (500 gold-related things!) exhibit devoted to “Solid Gold.”

That’s a curious title for a collection mostly composed of anything but. “Solid Gold” promises an explicit examination of what both words mean. But it’s an emptier choice for an exhibit that mostly highlights illusions and veneers — the Cleopatra costumes and Rihanna dresses, the “gold tone” high-fashion designs, the gold-colored plastic — and doesn’t spend a lot of time wrestling with the resulting ironies.

With some exceptions. There’s a fantastic wall of gold bricks — or, it turns out, wooden blocks covered in gold leaf — dominating one gallery: Zadik Zadikian’s “Path to Nine.” According to the Brooklyn Museum, if the bricks were solid gold, they would be worth $1 billion. (And quite likely more, given the record-breaking runup in gold prices since that caption was written.)

There are dutiful walls devoted to the dangers of mining and the “enduring cost of gold.” And there’s a stunning duo of paintings by Titus Kaphar: Byzantine-style gold-leaf portraits depicting incarcerated or formerly incarcerated men with the same name as his father. Kaphar dipped the paintings in tar, in one case completely covering the subject’s face, to indicate the amount of each man’s life spent in prison.

But then there’s the entire room devoted to Dior’s marketing campaign for “J’adore.” Yes, the perfume commercials. Yes, Dior sponsored “Solid Gold.”

The overwhelming mood is cheerfully consumerist and carefully apolitical. There’s plenty of homage paid to the fashion designers and celebrities who have embraced and popularized gold. But there’s no mention of the current president, who wields so much more power, and his decades-long preference for all things gold (building facades, Oval Office decor, sneakers, visas).

Nor is there much discussion of our modern wealth disparities, the oligarchs who benefit from them, or how they have culminated in our new Gilded Age. But that silence is probably inevitable for an exhibition sponsored by Dior, the fashion brand owned by French luxury conglomerate LVMH — whose founder and CEO, Bernard Arnault, is one of the world’s wealthiest men.

Arnault sat in the billionaires’ section of the inauguration dias in January, as President Trump promised a new “golden age of America.” By which he meant, it turns out, making it prohibitively expensive for U.S. consumers or businesses to buy things from anywhere else — including from Paris-based companies like LVMH.

This week, after Trump slapped new 20% taxes on imports from the European Union, shares in Arnault’s company plunged to their lowest level in five years. So did the broader U.S. stock market, where 60 percent of U.S. households have some of their money. And even the price of gold — usually seen as safer and more, well, “solid” in times of crisis — fell a little from its record highs.

This stock-market crash creates mostly “paper” losses for billionaire CEOs like Bernard Arnault, who have enough money and power to not feel the difference. For everyone else, however, a prolonged market selloff — not to mention the higher prices and potential recession that Trump’s tariffs risk bringing — threatens life-altering damage.

So it’s an especially urgent time for our institutions to examine wealth in this country: The performance of it, the celebrity it confers, how it gets distributed … and how solid it is, or isn’t. If only “Solid Gold” had been more interested in looking below the surface.