By Stephanie Tran
The numbers breakdown is as follows:
Hiddleston’s sold for £2,850
Cumberbatch’s sold for £2,649
And in third place, Finnemore’s sold for £620.05
Two things about this article stand out to me. First, the title of the article is “Greeting card designed by Benedict Cumberbatch sells for £2,649,” yet when Hiddleston’s card sold for more than Cumberbatch’s.
Yet the article focuses on Cumberbatch, probably intent on riding the man’s perpetual fame wave.
A similar quick search for follow up on Hiddleston yielded no results; it’s as if despite being a popular British icon, Hiddleston isn’t popular enough to merit follow up like Cumberbatch does.
This is odd because Hiddleston’s card raised more money (or stirred up a larger bidding war), a quantifiable value that Hiddleston, at least in this aspect, was superior to Cumberbatch, and yet while Cumberbatch received recognition in the title, Hiddleston was mentioned in a slew of names and pushed aside to make room for a detailed description of Cumberbatch’s card (at least a picture of Hiddleston’s card made it to the article). The quantifiable result, the comparative value of the card, if we assume that the card represents the actor’s ‘popularity quotient’ (it may or may not, but it provides a relative base of comparison), then it would appear that Hiddleston is more popular, yet the qualitative result, this effort placed into following up on Cumberbatch’s card, would suggest that Cumberbatch is more popular. No reason is ever given for this, but the fact that Cumberbatch didn’t even ‘win’ and got his own article speaks volumes about the man’s current trending popularity in the mainstream fandom. That is not to say Hiddleston isn’t as featured in the news, it just seems like Cumberbatch’s fans are a tad more obsessive about anything Cumberbatch related. The numbers are fairly close, after all.
Which brings me to my second point: The card that brought in the third most amount of money was beat by both Hiddleston and Cumberbatch by over 4 times the value of the card. This money game, using celebrities as ways to bring in money for charities, is absolutely fascinating because it takes money to play, an object of great perceived value (especially for a capitalist society – US buyers bought both Cumberbatch’s and Hiddleston’s cards) and while the hours of people fantasizing and obsessing over celebrities cannot be discounted, it takes a certain level of fan to spend actual money on celebrity paraphernalia, especially to the degree the Cumberbatch (and Hiddleston) fans have. It’s not even something related to acting or something Cumberbatch has contributed to; it’s entire value comes from “Cumberbatch is a celebrity and his hands have graced these series of supplies, crafting a card.”
It’s literally a representation of Cumberbatch’s popularity and this makes it beautifully quantifiable (if we look at the ‘popularity quotient’, we can quantify Cumberbatch as over 4 times as popular as Finnemore is, although we are unsure of the variables that differ (eg. audience, appeal, exposure) between the two).
While the results of the auction are being processed in a manner not unsimilar to back of the napkin math, at the very least, one can say that Cumberbatch fans are willing to spend a significantly larger amount of money over other celebrity fans (except Hiddleston fans).
It’s a large amount of money to spend to be able to claim that one has a card Cumberbatch made for charity; it wasn’t even made for the buyer. Everyone else can purchase a replica of the card for a substantially cheaper price. Literally, the only thing valuable about that card is that Cumberbatch made it and its direct connection to Cumberbatch makes it worth thousands more than the copies now circulating sites like RedBubble.
It’s speechlessly appalling the amount of money fans will spend to claim victories like these. I wonder if Cumberbatch even knows who they are.