Abolish luxury cars. Abolish private jets. Abolish large pleasure boats. And one could go on forever, always. The pauperists of all time (at least those of whom we have knowledge and memory, from Dolcino to Savonarola, up to the current theorists of so-called happy degrowth...) argue that it is better to be poor than rich, to have woods and wilds rather than cultivated fields (and in Italy, we have both), wild boars in cities, seagulls, rivers in flood rather than irrigation canals, with a crescendo of dogmatism that borders on the apocalyptic. Almost as if it were our fault, humanity's fault, for having persisted, despite extinct tyrannosaurs and still-present poisonous snakes. In recent days, the media (not the midia) have been banging away against the rich, against the wealthy, against all those who eat caviar and drink champagne; reading Serge Latouche (I have his ‘Goodbye to Growth" in my hand) it seems like an elegy to poverty, to Arcadia, and it goes all the way to Eden. This is a pointless debate, already anticipated by the French controversy of the 1700s on luxury as a source of corruption and depravity. I am absolutely in favour of luxury, of research, of experimentation, of waste!
You will ask me, why. And I will answer you immediately. Because I am resolutely modern, open, therefore for well-being, for culture, for art and for every formal boldness, be it Spoerri's table with food remnants, or Nish's slaughterings, not to mention Manzoni's canned artist's shit, but I don't disdain Carlo Maria Mariani, Salvo (who remembers him...) Francesco Clemente. I love Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Lee Byars' golds, Bulgari's jewellery, Ulysse Nardin watches and all those things that make human genius great which would otherwise be unused, or wasted in the standard, in trivial repetition, in the unstylish and unpretentious economic, in the national-popular. Luxury (even in the deplorable disparities it promotes) is the avant-garde of civilization, the breakthrough point of cliché, towards the unknown, the fantastic. Without the avant-garde and research, typical of modernity (which existed even before, even if not defined as such, from Hypatia to Archimedes, from Antonello to Caravaggio) there is no progress, there is no originality and then, let us joyfully welcome with our eyes and minds even that which we do not possess, ourselves, directly. New potlatches? Yes, let them be welcome, if they allow abundant energy to flow to everyone. Rich and Beautiful!
KLESSIDRA | EDITED BY FRANCESCO GALLO MAZZEO
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