Conspicuous consumption — the display of wealth as an expression of economic power — is not a new phenomenon but it has arguably never been as easy to practice. Social media has helped normalize it, providing a frame of competitive individualism and entrepreneurship in which the experience of affluence must be documented and shared online. Reveling in the thrill of a good purchase, the instinct is to share it with friends and followers online. [...]
These oil paintings were produced in a period marked by the consolidation of the mercantile bourgeoisie, an emerging class benefitting from expanded trading routes with the colonies. It was the age of the Grand Tour, when the noble sons of northern Europe journeyed through France and Italy in search of antiquity and the origins of European culture, on their way encountering art, music, and food, and enjoying occasional bouts of sexual revelry and wild drunkenness. The trips could last a few years, and often relied on seemingly unlimited funds from back home. [...]
The following sketches, which bring together a selection of two distinct image species (European oil paintings from 1650–1750 and Instagram pictures from 2012–14), draw on Berger’s insights. A work of visual analysis rather than art history, the comparisons connect a culture of the present with one of the past — both in order to better understand the selections themselves, and the desperately unequal world that produced them. [...]
But this is not about taste or enjoyment. It is about the spectacle of pleasure — his satisfaction comes not from the wine itself, but from the knowledge that others realize he possesses it. Such is the logic behind “sinking,” the fashionable practice of ordering two bottles of champagne and having one poured down the sink — a display of braggadocio signifying disdain for cost and a gratification in denying others the experience of wealth rather than sharing it.
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