John Howe

Regis Debray

Against Venice

My man should just have gone to Trieste. Enjoyable polemic, with which I largely agree on the big issues (falsity and inauthenticity, over-aestheticisation, tourism as destructive force, the creeping Baudrillardian banalisation of everything, the inherent ugliness of Baroque architecture) but disagree with in nitty-gritty details.

The thing is that the quest for true authenticity is, itself, the first stumble down the slide of Veniceification. The implied contrast between the self-proclaimed 'aristocracy of taste' weeping over Tintoretto and ghastly putti and the Rialto, & un-aestheticised, real life in Naples fails for several reasons — first, because this is just a way to establish a new 'aristocracy of taste' (q.v. all other projects of consciously scorning the consensus taste of the rich and tacky); and second, because it aestheticises away the fact that the transition out of the ordinary and into simulacrum is a transition out of the isolation of poverty and into the world. The problem is that the real people of Naples, Lisbon, Palermo, anywhere left in Europe still praised by those-in-the-know for its singular way of living, its maintenance of its connection to the vanished world, its resistance to IKEA chipboard furniture and chain stores: those people do not desire the vanished world at all, they contain in themselves all the same old banal desires that we do, they crave the median of the taste of the global middle class, they genuinely welcome the Dread Mouse of Disney. Where do we go from there?

Against Venice

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