Gstaad
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, with a 24-hour non-stop snowfall, an empty main street, and the closing of the Palace hotel as well as of the Eagle club. (I give the traditional closing-day speech at the club, and this year’s was judged to have been politically incorrect.) The older I get the more I like it off season, the toadies and parasites of the truly rich having followed their masters to places like St Barts or the Bahamas. Tarts, pimps, art dealers, jewellery salesmen, real-estate sharks, you name them, we’ve got them. During the season, that is. One disgusting little man of Lebanese–Israeli origin even managed to infiltrate my backgammon game and passed his catalogue around. It’s a sad day when one can’t even relax over backgammon without a Japanese-made Modigliani being shoved in front of one. There are also some magnificent unsigned Picassos and some extremely rare ones spelled with one ‘s’.
New money needs new art, and there’s a lot of the former around. The Saudi who built a chalet and had his family tree carved on the outside applied for the Eagle and I put my foot down. ‘But you don’t know him,’ said the charming female secretary at the door. ‘He’s very nice.’ That’s the whole point, I said to her, I don’t wish to know him and if you do let him come in on a season pass I insist he wear western clothes. ‘If this gets out,’ said the charming secretary, ‘they’ll be after you, trust me.’ I told her not to worry, that I would include it in my column so there will be no mix-up.
What is amazing is how scared people are to discriminate. The whole point of a club is to keep people who like each other in, and those who they don’t like out. I like people who have good manners, who are sporty and who can tell the difference between a fraud such as Freud and a De Staël. Speaking of Freud, that fat old queen John Richardson put out some story about Freud tripping me in some restaurant, but it’s simply not true. I get foot-swept non-stop in judo, so an old fraud like Freud is hardly the type to trip me and make me fall. (When he was alive and kicking, that is.) But it’s a fun story: good guy Freud makes bad guy Taki fall down.
Lucian Freud is always called great by art dealers, critics and hacks who don’t know any better. A true great, Paul Johnson, once explained to me how the bum disguised his artistic flaws by pouring the paint on ugly and contorted female nudes and even uglier male pachyderms. In my opinion, personal feelings aside, Freud never evolved beyond his flaws of drawing and construction, but used tricks and mannerisms to cover them up. Some of the still-life stuff was good, but mainly he was a minor artist who has been elevated to the pantheon of the greats because people can make lotsa moolah from his terrible, terrible art. Thus spake the great art critic Taki.
And speaking of art in general, I read that a Kuwaiti female artist, Shurooq Amin, opened an exhibit that was closed almost immediately because her paintings implied homosexuality and forbidden substances. Now as everyone knows, there are no homosexuals in that part of the world, and no one takes drugs either. Knowing how kind Kuwaitis and Saudis are, I expect her body will surface somewhere in the Gulf some time around Easter. Mind you, we civilised westerners are not far behind.
The Telegraph reported last week how a human rights organisation that advises the UN on issues of racism and discrimination wants to do away with a book by one Dante Alighieri called the Divine Comedy. Bad Dante, bigoted Dante! He represents Islam as a heresy and Jews as greedy and scheming moneylenders. Homosexuals are damned by the bully Dante as being against nature. The spokeswoman (dread word) and president of this outfit, one Valentina Sereni, wants the book removed from school and university curricula. She calls the epic poem racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic. She covered all the bases so at least we know where we stand if we read the Divine Comedy. It means we are homophobes, anti-Semites, hate Islam and want to kill all black people.
Florence King, a wonderful southern writer, once wrote, ‘Democracy is the crude leading the crud.’ Hear, hear! Only in a dumb demo-cracy like ours can a crude woman like Sereni act like the Hitlers who shut down Amin’s show, and make it look as though she’s on the side of the angels. Any kind of ism has now replaced murder most foul and every other sin imaginable. Sereni should move to Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. And I now leave you because I have the Divine Comedy in front of me and am looking forward to reading it for the next ten hours of bliss. Now you know what that makes me without me having to explain it.
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