Summer is here, finally. Where will you go on holiday? The trend is to enjoy shorter times than in the past, when whole families used to spend the months from June to September at the seaside. Moreover, many people will have to be satisfied with cheap tourist destinations, enduring mosquitoes, unruly kids, mothers who yell even more than their children, and fathers in socks and singlets. A few others, the privileged ones, can still afford more chic shores such as Portofino, Porto Cervo, Forte dei Marmi, and Capri. Real paradises on earth, except for the need to endure the barbaric, rough and noisy horde of nouveaux riches. An interesting fauna who shout “give me the Cartier” when they want a lighter, or “where’s my Rolex?” when they are looking for their watch.
People who throw mega-parties – because “sponsors will pay for them” – in large villas that were designed by peculiar architects who consider themselves as good as Wright, but who design like provincial surveyors, imposing a savanna taste on buildings and gardens on the forty-fourth parallel north. Starlets seeking their fortune, waiting for some sheik or exotic oil tycoon to invite them on their yachts, which are as large as transatlantic ships. Dolls with plastic features who are so politically correct as to claim they have no bias against Islam and billionaires. And while they look adoringly at the ring they have just received as a present (it costs one hundred thousand euros, but they accepted it “out of courtesy” only), they readily swear love to the emir or – to the Russian or Ukrainian tycoon, they don’t care – “because his beauty is skin deep”.
Career women who, after leaving their dark pinstripe suit home, wear G-strings and smoke cigars voluptuously. And everyone – boors and bumpkins in the lead – complain and say, “Hey, Costa Smeralda, Versilia and even Cortina are no longer as they used to be”, in that nasal voice and with that rhotacism they consider so elegant on top of it. Too many nonentities behaving like VIPs. Sometimes, their resounding, poncey vulgarity can be amusing; most of the times, it makes you feel ashamed of being in the same restaurant as them, or even of sitting at their table.
Is this just high class, démodé irritation due to their lack of style? There is more to it than that. Consider, for instance, that these talkative people who boast to have spent 100 thousand euros to fill the tanks of their yachts and thirty thousand euros for prestigious bottles of wine in a famous club are the same people who enter art galleries to buy works they think can fit their positions: any work is ok, provided that it is kitsch and very expensive. And since they lack in aesthetic sensibility, they confuse real value with the price of a work, and are more than happy to spend staggering sums for masterpieces that are such only in their heads. Due to the law of supply and demand, those who want to sell works can do nothing but either go bankrupt or adapt. There is not too much to be happy about: unavoidably, the fate of art lies in the chubby, sweaty, ringed hands of this new class of buyers. Cardinal Piccolomini, Lorenzo the Magnificent, where are you?
