About the value of Grand Hotels

There are as many luxurious hotels in the world, all different to each other, as there are ways to interpret that word. All interpretations, regardless of one’s prejudices and in whatever version, have one thing in common, and that is that decadence is linked to demise. It is the harbinger of the end of something. Always. An apocalyptic mood. A means to combat the emptiness of our existence which, aware of our own mortality, we must somehow get through in a frenzy of hedonism. The fin de siècle, the fall of the Roman Empire and other empires and at some time, us too, in this rapturous world just before the climax. We no longer build any edifices that will last for a thousand years, such is the nature of democracies, and democrats do not indulge in orgies where champagne flows in torrents like in Thomas Couture’s Les Romains de la décadence, without any penalty. Our decadence consists of things that can be bought and decoration that turns things into something they are not. Bookshelf wallpaper, advertising mock-ups, shop window mannequins, barn eggs, holding patterns, telephoning in general, or what today still remains of telephoning: people who take, upload and download photographs, shop online, hardly any antique shops anymore, just shops where one can purchase cell phones, short pants and doner kebabs. We are a throwaway generation who will go to demonstrations any time but would still prefer to buy five pairs of cheap shoes instead of one good quality pair that will last a long time. It is easily said, without much thought, that this is because it is expensive, and anything expensive is only for rich people, and whatever one might think of rich people, they are not all arms dealers.