All gaudy frontage. (Credit: Ernesto Ruscio/GC Images/Getty)
Venice and Jeff Bezos belong together. Both are shopkeepers — well, shops — both use myth to drive sales beyond the plausible; both have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams of avarice. Bezos could buy a palace on the Grand Canal and open an Amazon warehouse on the ground floor. They may be centuries old, but the palazzi of Venice are made for this. Everything here changes, and everything stays the same.
Venice is a fishing village founded by people fleeing the Germans after the Roman Empire fell. If it looks improbable, it is: a city in the middle of a lagoon covered with marble when cost allows. She lies at the head of the Adriatic, where the trade routes meet — a wise investment in the crusades. Now a party town, a whore in brick and marble, Venice flaunts itself for Bezos’s wedding and attendant festivals. This is its expertise: this is what it lives for. Here be Trumps, Kardashians, the Queen of Jordan, Leonardo DiCaprio and Orlando Bloom, plus Oprah Winfrey: a guest list conjured by AI because, like actors in a play, they do not know each other. They were not invited to this wedding, but cast, and stalked to a shallow lagoon by the world’s press. It is an ancient display of power and control, so expensive no one can say what it costs: all of Bezos’s childhood dreams of being.
It is the final reveal — the unboxing — of the aesthetic of the age, and this also suits Venice, which loves aesthetics as much as it loves power, though it has more of the former than the latter these days. Theirs is a populist aesthetic, and at least — the bar is low here — it is honest: the most honest thing about oligarchy is its clothing. Vulgarity is always honest because it doesn’t want to be any thing else. At least it is not Cottage Core, which exists for rich Liberals to lie to themselves, and everyone, about how good they are. That is an aesthetic of denial. This isn’t.
This is the aesthetic of the Age of Trump: lewdness, power, rot and colour blocking. It is pornographic, of course, and thrillingly unreal. The faces and breasts are augmented and shiny: not good enough as they are — for this is an aesthetic of anxiety, too — they must be renewed. They are gaudy frontage, like Venice herself, and the aesthetic mirrors Trump, made more for TV than for life. I think it is, essentially, a cry for Mama in the dark — tits, tits, tits! — and a cry for Dada too: bring me the diamonds! Will that make you happy, children afraid of the night? Of course not, but it’s worth a try.
Nothing is hidden and nothing is dissembled by these crazed exhibitionists: it is almost touching. And yet it is also costume. Kim Kardashian, all snakeskin and breasts, a hundred feet tall, reminds me of the vast Madonna on the walls of the Torcello cathedral in the Venetian lagoon, surrounded by fields of gold mosaic. I imagine her cracking from the walls and walking across the lagoon for a prick of Ozempic at the wedding, though the Kardashians might think her understated. Sánchez, who usually dresses like a Real Housewife of An Apocalypse Bunker, had multiple costume changes over the weekend, like a woman who does not know who she is and is now so rich she never will. She was a lampshade, Audrey Hepburn, and Princess Grace of Monaco, with graceless cleavage. She blew kisses to the media because that is easier — it has more reach — than speech.
What do they do? Not much, and it doesn’t matter here; it would be odd if they did, and we would be unable to project onto them so happily. Sánchez was a TV journalist: now she is a picture caption. Bezos sells things to people who confuse TV with life. Kardashian is in Reality TV: she does the same. DiCaprio sank with the Titanic. Orlando Bloom played an elf of Middle Earth, which was far less weird than this.
But no one will say it — this wedding is weird, a royal wedding for commoners, a carnival made for press attention — because where there is power, there is tribute. Anna Wintour, the former editor of Vogue, gatekeeper of global style, prostrated herself before the couple, apparently offering them space in her magazine: I never pitied high fashion until now. Is Lauren Sánchez stylish if she appears in Vogue? Of course not: even I know not to wear a camisole to a presidential inauguration. Rather, Vogue is shameless to have her: it is taken over, colonised by the money it follows, another estate fallen to ruin.
There is more tribute from protestors who threatened to jump in canals with inflatable alligators to force Bezos out of Venice because they are exhibitionists too. No oligarchs welcome, they said, which means they do not understand the city they are in.
It is true that Venice was, until Napoleon, a Republic: of oligarchs. They wrote their names in the Golden Book, their Debrett’s Peerage; they power-boated in gondolas; they built a ship while the King of France was having lunch. All of Bezos’s tinny excess fits with Venice. I fantasise that he will insinuate himself into Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin in the Frari. They might let him if he fixed the roof. Venice will do almost anything for a price. That’s its charm.
Above all, Venice fascinates because she works as metaphor. She was once everything humans were capable of, and she exists in peril from the sea. Daily jeopardy, then, but for what now? Very little. No wonder Bezos chose Venice for his fete: if futility were a city, this is it. Nothing besides remains.
