There’s a term that has fallen out of fashion which was once used to describe the consequence-free decadence that afflicts America’s more unruly heirs: “Wasp rot.” Two decades ago, it was used to describe the wayward son George W. But whereas Barney’s works are as harmless as a Ralph Lauren ad, and barbed pictures like Cindy Sherman’s ghoulish “Society Portraits” can be laughed off as caricatures, Ellison captures America’s moneyed and serves them up for public scrutiny on a veritable silver platter, as only one of their own could. His approach to his subjects can feel playful and even lightly erotic, as in scenes of a shirtless hunk in “Hiker” (2015) or a bare-assed home chef in “Pasta Night” (2016). “It’s so clear to me that one of the main things that perpetuates inequality is our silence around it,” he told me. Bucking this prohibition, Ellison could be considered something of a class traitor.
When you have it, and you’ve always had it, and the working assumption is that your progeny will have it in perpetuity as well, mentioning money is not just impossibly gauche but carries with it an air of superstition, lest speaking of its existence might summon up questions of whether it’s deserved. This is to say: one simply does not talk about money. It’s the kind of thing that gets you booted off the pages of the Social Register or blackballed by the Colonial Dames of America. In making his pictures, Ellison is in violation of a cardinal rule. Truth be told, this embarrassment is a part of his cultural inheritance. “I remember being really embarrassed because I was, like, ‘I’m interested in this picture of Range Rovers,’ ” Ellison said. program he attended, at Frankfurt’s famed Städelschule, most students favored more avant-garde subject matter. “That took a second coming out for me,” he said. But it didn’t make turning a camera back on his privileged background any easier. As a teen-ager he came out as gay, which set him far enough apart from his surroundings to give him critical distance. He looks the part, too: tall and square-jawed, with the bearing of a collegiate rower, and when I interviewed him over Zoom he wore his late grandfather’s sporty steel Rolex. Like Barney, a scion of the Lehman family who married a wealthy New Englander, Ellison hails from the Waspish world that is his subject (though he grew up in the Bay Area, where new money reigns).
On the contrary, they are part of his milieu. For Ellison, however, these élite hoarders of wealth are neither surreal nor mysterious.
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