High life | 21 September 2017

As everyone who stands up when a lady enters the room knows, the once sacrosanct rules of civility throughout the West have all but disappeared. The deterioration in manners has been accelerated by the coming of the devil’s device, the dehumanising iPhone, as well as by phoney ‘art’ and artists such as Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons. I don’t know why, but Warhol is a bugbear of mine. He always treated me politely, featured me favourably in his magazine Interview, and referred to me in a good light in his diaries. Perhaps me being violent back then — he headlined a cover story with a reference to me being a terrorist among the rich — made him think twice before he stuck the knife in. Warhol ruined many lives by leading people astray with drugs and false promises, but most of all he ruined art by making it showy. The fact that today’s hustlers sell a picture of a Coke bottle or a shark suspended in formaldehyde for millions is obscene. The worship of money and celebrity is Warhol’s legacy and art’s tragedy.

I thought of Warhol and what I call ELCP — Extraordinarily Lower Class People — as I roamed around London this week. Being an ELCP has nothing to do with the old class system; it is all about vile manners while shopping in Bond Street. Most ELCPs are Chinese, with dyed blond hair, wires in their ears and an extremely vapid expression on their faces. The only thing that matters to an ELCP is wealth, and the ability to out-shop the next idiot. Comfort and fame are also prerequisites. They are forever posting pictures of their ugly selves via the devil’s instrument. The Tao, which was known as the Way of Heaven, and which embodied the sacred character of ancient China, has gone with the same wind that swept away the antebellum south in the US.