OPINION:
Wealth, or the lack of it, is never out of the news. Especially in an economic downturn when everyone feels threatened, there’s always a lot of rich-bashing about: one UK newspaper railed at the UK’s new prime minister Rishi Sunak for being “richer than the king”.
I’m recovering from the excesses of the art market over past weeks — a magnificent, if overcrowded, edition of Frieze London, with its elegant sister Frieze Masters, followed by an assured newcomer in Art Basel’s Paris+ fair. No one can spend long in these halls of cultural luxury without thinking about money, who has it and how, and the gulf between the very rich and the rest is never more glaring than when watching the apparent ease with which millions change hands in buying art.
It does strange things to your head, I find. Not long ago at an auction viewing, gazing at a valuable work of art up for sale, the image of a street suddenly swam into my head. It’s an ordinary east London street of two-bedroom terraced houses where my godson bought his first house not long ago. I realised that the square metre or two of canvas in front of me could “buy” the entire street, all 80 or so houses, and all the lives contained in them. Houses whose occupants are now terrified that the current rises in mortgage rates will force them out of these homes. Love art though I do, I can’t help feeling that picture really has a lot to prove.
At a moment when all but the richest feel financially wobbly, a distrust of uber-wealth can become an obsession. So, the second series of The White Lotus, whose first, set in the eponymous hotel in Hawaii, openly mocks a picaresque parade of egregiously moneyed characters, is well timed. We see the staff plaster on fake smiles for their rich and whimsical guests, whose self-absorption and pigheadedness are by turns horrifying, hilarious, nauseating and — yes — sometimes rather touching.