Who says you can’t put a price on glove? Jacko’s goes for $420,000

This Michael Jackson glove sold for $420,000 Saturday. Rumors place the missing mate at a Wal-Mart lost and found in Kansas.

Talk about a mitten you’d want to keep on a string: Michael Jackson’s infamous rhinestone-studded glove just went via auction to a Hong Kong businessman for $420,000. And it has me wondering who has that kind of money to throw around … regardless of how the hand throwing it is clothed.

One Hoffman Ma, a businessman from Hong Kong, bragged that he got a “fairly good discount” on the glove at an auction of Jackson memorabilia Saturday, according to the PopEater web site. Which makes me want to question Ma’s business sense: The glove was expected to fetch $50,000 in pre-auction estimates.

Of course, the value of a veritable pop-culture talisman, a one-of-a-kind item owned by the late King of Pop, may be hard to pin down. This is, after all, the same glove that Jackson wore when he unveiled the “moonwalk” during Motown’s 25th anniversary special. The same glove M.C. Hammer once proclaimed he would take away as a challenger to Jackson’s throne. Judging by Hammer’s reverse career trajectory in the years that followed, you could make a case for the glove’s supernatural powers to curse all R&B challengers. (MJ to MC: You can’t touch this.)

And so, put yourself in the shoes–no wait, the mitts–of Mr. Hoffman Ma, whose name couldn’t be better suited for a modern-day Dickensian tale of pop-culture possessiveness. So now you snagged the glove, Ma. What do you do?

Do you don it and dance Tom Cruise-style in your underwear around your Hong Kong penthouse, blasting “Billie Jean” at 11? Do you cryogenically freeze the thing in a glove Baggie and train six security cameras on it? Do you dare throw snowballs with it? Eh, nix that. (Hong Kong weather is too warm for snow.)

No doubt Ma now owns the bragging rights to an accessory that ranks right up there with Bono’s shades, Judy Garland’s ruby slippers and John Travolta’s disco suit from “Saturday Night Fever.” Personally I think it would be fun to own, so long as no one knew. You might even be able to hide it in plain sight–that is, wear it to parties and tell people, “Hey, it’s Jacko’s glove.” “Yeah right. Looks like you bought it at a post-Halloween party store closeout. What’d you pay for that thing? 5 bucks?”

And so it goes with all pop culture ephemera: The glove itself is not nearly so valuable as the meaning attached to it, based on the man or woman who wears it. It reminds me of the superstition my fellow guitar players have–that the longer an axe slinger owns and plays a guitar, the more of his soul seeps into it. And with Jackson gone, the notion that his glove might contain even a hair of his magic certainly seems alluring.

Not that I would pay almost a half million dollars for it, let alone $42.75 on eBay (well, maybe $50 if the bidding got fierce).

I subscribe to the theory that “where your heart lies, your treasure lies also.” And for all the item’s symbolism, I just can’t see squeezing my heart into a trinket so tiny as an entertainer’s glove.