“How did the Germans of the 1930s look at Hitler and fail to think, ‘Dude, you’ve got, like, a skull on your cap. What are you, 14? And what’s with the ‘tache? You know Chaplin is trying to be funny, right?’”

Why do powerful dictators, who have the enormous wealth to build and decorate lavish palaces, have such terrible taste? Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Nicolae Ceausescu, Kim Jong-Il: they all built monstrous and supremely tacky monuments to their own opulence. An article in The Guardian reviews a recent book and documentary that attempt to answer that question.

“‘These places,’ says York, ‘are hideous to educated, middle-class, western eyes. But these men aren’t concerned with taste. It’s about having what they wanted when they were 17 and living in a hovel, or expressing what-a-lot-I-got, or trying to generate pride in a nation. These are all crude, graphic stories, and they need to be drawn in a cartoon way…. We look at these things with a 21st-century ironic eye. Post-modern ironic eyes didn’t exist in these societies. In their position, you would have to do all that. No other symbolism would be understood. In countries which often don’t have a free press, or much of an educated middle class, it has to be cartoonish.’”

Isn’t there more than a whiff of snobbery in that assessment? How does one then explain that the ruling family of Renaissance Florence, the Medicis, were responsible for commissioning some of the greatest art ever created? They too were only doing it to display their prestige and power, but good taste was evidently extremely important to them. Surely their subjects didn’t have more education than present-day middle-class Iraqis? I’m fairly certain that during the Renaissance almost no one could read or write.

When my parents lived in Newport, Rhode Island, I visited the famous Newport mansions. They’re not exceptionally beautiful, for the most part, but they’re attractive and graceful enough. But even while listening to the earnest speeches of the tour guides, I couldn’t help thinking about the cost in human misery that the wealth to create these mansions had exacted. All opulence, whether tacky or lovely, leaves a bad taste. And insisting on making a distinction between elegant and coarse opulence is in bad taste too, it seems to me.

It goes something like this: poor people who become rich have bad taste, but rich people who have always been rich have refined sensibilities. Could it be that different people simply enjoy different things? Maybe a person with a sense of humor might prefer to have something funny rather than sophisticated. Some folks might just have the imagination to envision gyrating fountains or gigantic gold statues of themselves. Let’s not kid ourselves: all ostentatious displays of wealth and power are obscene, regardless of whether they’re coated in a veneer of discernment and snobbery.

If you have wealth, and you’re hoarding it, or wasting it on stupid, senseless adornments for yourself or your opulent home, well then shame on you! I don’t care if you have good taste: you might as well write “greedy, narcissistic bastard” across your forehead.

“It would, indeed, be possible to edit the footage of Saddam’s palaces into a hip-hop-related edition of Cribs (the reasoning behind the ostentation is similar in both cases: a desire to declare status, and impress the credulous). York … reckons that the relatively humble backgrounds of most dictators are significant. Elvis escaped from a two-room shack in Tupelo to Graceland. Hitler, the embittered veteran and hapless artist, dreamed of having the entirety of Berlin rebuilt to his own specifications.”

[Found via: Arts & Letters Daily]

I never thought I would be a fan. I usually don’t like anything. I’m too grouchy, too petty and too envious. When I was younger I used to revel in nitpicking and finding fault: it was such a guilty relief to find other people’s mistakes, to see someone else fail. Now that I’m old I still think most of everything sucks, but I’m too tired to care. I no longer compare myself to other pretentious fops, since I no longer think I am one, and it no longer galls me nor comforts me to see the crap they’ve created. I can just let it sit there, wallowing in its mediocrity like a quivering Jell-O mold, and it doesn’t affect me much.

I went to art school, and that’s what we were trained in: finding fault. We’d spend however long working on drawings or projects, then slap them all up on the wall or the table to be scrutinized and picked apart. Personally, I loved it. I was a nerd who had spent a lifetime pleasing teachers, so I was adept at knowing what was expected and rarely screwed up badly enough to have my work held up as an example of what not to do. And figuring out exactly why something sucks, as long as it’s somebody else’s fuckup, is like a detective hunt for slip-ups and moments of weakness or insincerity. Everything shows in what you do. If you didn’t mean what you said or drew or sang, it shows.

I don’t like serious art, most of the time, because it’s pretentious and self-important. Why would it be fun for me to have you throw in my face how clever and exquisitely sensitive you are? Get over yourself, please. But I don’t like low art and crass commercialism either. Most of the time it’s just uninteresting. I don’t want to be marketed to, or told how to feel and react: this is when you laugh, here’s where you sigh wistfully, and in this part you’ll be turned on by the hot dude/chick.

Long ago, when I had potential, I thought I was supposed to be the one who came up with something great that other people were going to admire, not the prostrate follower, who fawns on the greatness of someone else’s accomplishment. But now that I am that, a hopelessly devoted fan and admirer, it’s really lovely. It’s such a delicious feeling to be able to be mesmerized, to look at something that is so heartbreaking and beautiful that it nearly brings to tears to your eyes, and sometimes, when it catches you off guard, actually makes you cry.

If that makes me sound like a nut job, so be it. I’m actually dull and sober, not a nut job at all. I can’t stand frippery, and I have no patience for flaky beliefs in supernatural beings or enraptured states of mind. I’m stubbornly realistic, pessimistic, and fatalistic. I’m so boring and practical it’s like my head is made of cement, thank you very much. (Okay, so mine is not the good kind of solidity that doesn’t fly off the handle or maintains a clear head in an argument, or deals well with disappointment or anxiety — I could go on. It’s more like an ornery kind of immovable weight that is unlikely to be persuaded or misled.)

I was watching some videos I downloaded of a show that Green Day played in 1990, at a high school, in what looks like the school’s parking lot, when they were just teenaged babies. It was so incredibly sweet. How does somebody know, when they’re that young, to be so guileless and honest? Is it just instinct? Does it have to do with what you’re made of? I think it does. If you’re someone who is genuinely generous, genuinely humble, and brave enough to go all out and do the very best you can, then you can play in the parking lot of a high school, at eighteen years old, and leave someone who is watching a crappy video of it fifteen years later speechless and in tears.