RELICS OF CAMELOT

By ROBERT HUGHES

FIRST COMES THE DOCTOR; THEN THE PRIEST; THEN THE undertaker; and finally, Sotheby's. When you come down to it, auctioneering is a lugubrious trade. It thrives on death, divorce and debt, and the pink, deferential Brit in the now empty Park Avenue living room is to upper-class America what buzzards once were to luckless prospectors in Arizona. When the famous die, the salesmen perk up--but the trouble is that the really good art and antiques do not necessarily belong to the really famous. Ergo, find a way of using their fame to endorse their possessions, and turn the sale into a relic hunt.

In recent years, the auction business (led, in this regard, by Sotheby's) has shown wonderful ingenuity at such stratagems. There was, for instance, the sale in Switzerland in 1987 of the Duchess of Windsor's jewelry at which the rich of several nations paid five, 10, 20 times their value for baubles once owned by that calcified drone of a woman, merely because another drone had resigned the crown of England to marry her 50 years before. Then there was the Andy Warhol auction, also in 1987, at which bidders sent the price of the defunct celeb's $25 black-mammy and teddy-bear cookie jars to $20,000 and beyond. And now--admittedly in a more chastened economic climate--we have the sale of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' household effects, coming up April 23 through 26.

Thus Sotheby's has secured something that no manufacturer of luxury goods or services in the world was ever able to get: the endorsement of Jackie O, America's chief secular saint (there are no male contenders), on a line of products for sale. A posthumous endorsement, to be sure; but relic hunting, by definition, has to be posthumous. If the Virgin Mary had died surrounded by Chinese soup tureens and minor Hellenistic antiquities, instead of the wooden bench (workshop of St. Joseph, estimate 20 to 30 copper pieces) and the simple tin cup that presumably furnished her abode in Jerusalem, the rush for pious souvenirs would not have been greater.

Some of the faithful will have to be content with the catalog, which was published last week. It is a thick paragon of low-intensity salesmanship: plain cream cover, small gray type, no objet d'art staring from it--which is only proper, since what Sotheby's is selling is spiritual contact. Some 100,000 copies are available, at $90 (hardback) and $45 (soft). This print run will probably take care of the cost of the color plates, which are many and which reproduce such treasures as Lot 924, "A Set of Six French Stoneware Butter Pots, Modern," estimate $75 to $100. The catalog lists 1,195 lots and has a carefully phrased introduction by Jackie's children, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and John F. Kennedy Jr., pointing out that "we have given objects and documents that help chronicle the Kennedy Administration and her role as First Lady to the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation."

In other words, the Camelot garage sale has nothing of historical significance in it. Even the famed rocking chair, factory-made in North Carolina not so long ago, turns out--like the leg bone of St. Mark or the Holy Prepuce--to exist in at least two versions, one at the start of the auction and one, to catch the laggards, at the end; and there is no way to know which one the presidential backside spent more time in. Quite right too. Only aura will count with the bidders.

But what else can be said of the material that is going on the block? Well, who could dislike it? One of Jacqueline Onassis' more winning features was that although she could fight for historic preservation and had a lively sense of how history can speak from objects, she was not a collector; she didn't have the obsessive character of the person who invests his or her self-esteem in an exoskeleton of artworks. She was not, in other words, even faintly touched by the mania of a Wallis Simpson or a Warhol, and so her possessions were less interesting than theirs.

She liked decor, and paging through the catalog is rather like going through some memorial issue of House & Garden dedicated to conventional, upper-class, Sister-Parishy interiors: everything good, nothing exceptional, and certainly nothing weird or exuberant. It reflects the absolutely standard taste of many American women of her class and generation. She liked white-pickled fauteuils and Indian miniatures, 17th century drawings of uncertain authorship, 19th century Chinese blue-and-white pots, theater prints, architectural capriccios, Victorian mahogany and squishy ecru upholstery. Her tastes in painting were exceedingly tame. There is one drawing by Robert Rauschenberg among all the decorator items, and a couple of minor Sargent watercolors, but that's about it--and the Rauschenberg was a gift from the artist anyway. What she liked more was jewelry, both real gems (a whopping diamond as an engagement present from Ari) and fashion confections by Kenneth Jay Lane.

What will the lucky ticket holders who are permitted to be present at Sotheby's Manhattan headquarters next month pay for all this stuff? Don't ask. And it probably won't matter to many of them if the value of their trophies drops by half as soon as they are out of the sale room. They will have entered a kind of virtual attic, where the ever less distinct folk memories of Camelot are kept. Who says Americans have lost their sense of piety?