affluence is a ghettoepilogue-2 – le marche 2013

Thurs-Aug8 050aWhen we were in the south, we headed to the Adriatic, to San Benedetto del Tronto hoping to find the Paolo Annibali sculptures along the waterfront. We couldn’t find them. However across the street from the beautiful ocean-front park were two proclamations, scrawled on the white walls of a fancy hotel, exposing the modern condition of isolation-and-sickness through that most virulent of art forms – graffiti.
Some of my countrymen seem to have figured out that affluence is not a gift from God regardless what the Calvinists claim, but a yellow badge that confines the human soul to a gated colony of lepers. And that beauty, as defined by modernity, is more about prosthesis and enhancements than symmetry, elegance and wisdom. (Last summer, the Franciscan Friars proclaimed tu sei bellezza about the Virgin Mary. This summer, in San Benedetto del Tronto, the young anarchists diagnosed beauty’s current condition . . .)

and beauty is sick

Thurs-Aug8 048

The rich are living in ghettos and the supermodels are dieing of beauty.