Trump l’oeil: the atrium of Trump Towers.
Peter York has a fascinating essay over at Politico, about the shared aesthetics of dictators. Florid, overblown, excessive, and so on. Within this rather limited aesthetic, York identifies 10 defining dictator chic rules obeyed by most dictators, and he wrote a book about Dictator Chic. Just a bit here:
After my book Dictator Style came out, friends and editors would call me to alert me to the latest tranche of pictures to be released: unverified photos of Robert Mugabe’s plutocratic-looking house in Zimbabwe, the sacked Qadhafi compound in Tripoli and the Yanukovych palace in Kiev. Each time, I felt as if I could predict every last chair cover and golden heroic beast. Come on, I’d think, surprise me!
Then, in late 2015, I came across a set of pictures with no identifying text. They appeared to show a gigantic apartment in what looked, from the windows, very much like New York. But I know Manhattan and its sophisticated style pretty well, and at first glance, you would think the place didn’t belong to an American but to a Russian oligarch, or possibly a Saudi prince with a second home in the United States. There were overscaled rooms, and obviously incorrect-looking historical detailing and proportions. The home had lots of gilded French furniture and the strange impersonal look of a hotel lobby, with chairs and sofas placed uncomfortably far from one another. There were masses of gold; there were the usual huge chandeliers, branded relics of famous sportsmen like Muhammad Ali, and mushroom-colored marble floors. There was relatively little in the way of paintings, but otherwise, the place reeked of dictator chic.
As it turned out, this familiar yet unfamiliar apartment—a familiar style to me by then, but in an unlikely location—belonged to Donald Trump, who by then was running for president. This was the penthouse of the potential leader of the free world. The design work, I have since learned, was started by the late Angelo Donghia, a decorator better known for a chic Manhattan look. But the substantive current design had been done by one Henry Conversano, who designed extensively—and perhaps unsurprisingly—for casinos. No matter how you looked at it, the main thing this apartment said was, “I am tremendously rich and unthinkably powerful.” This was the visual language of public, not private, space. It was the language of the Eastern European and Middle Eastern nouveau riche.
Why does all of this matter? Domestic interiors reveal how people want to be seen. But they also reveal something about the owners’ inner lives, their cultural reference points and how they relate to other people.
Head over to Politico for the full article, recommended!
Let’s just add “interior decoration” to the long list of Trump’s crimes.
GOD DAMNED that is ugly! (And no, just because I am an atheist, I did not give up a good swear word.)
Crimes against interior decoration seem to be a definite dictator thing. The article was enlightening, because I don’t pay much attention to interior design, but it’s not just the ostentatious vulgarity. There’s a deliberate choice of cheap, new stuff, gilded over and made to look old. I’d about kill to get my hands on a genuinely old refectory table, and I’d cherish every mark of age on it.
Seems to me that dictators’ eschewing of anything old is a neon sign to how much they cherish ignorance, and have no use for past history in any sense. It certainly applies to Trump.
Oh, and all that gold plate? Boring.
Many years ago I commuted to college with an architecture student. He went on a field trip to Springdale, Arkansas to see the new digs of a newly-minted turkey-processing millionaire, who had been a mere Arkansas hillbilly turkey farmer a couple of years before. My friend said that the Turkey Baron had apparently toured Europe with his wife, and whenever they saw something large and “classy,” they bought it and had it sent home. Classical Greek, Roman, Italian Renaissance, German, Slovenian, English….. just so it was “classy,” it went in their house.
Trump has at least some alliance with turkeys, I think…..
Coragyps @ 5, it’s otherwise known as Nouveau riche crassy. People have said you can sell any old crap to the newly rich, at highly inflated prices.
Good taste requires at least some sensitivity.
These people do not want to have pretty things to enjoy and cherish, they want to boast about their wealth.
Napoleon Bonaparte was considered comparably to Trump -- flashy, cheesy, arrogant, gilded -- people were on the fence. Some loved the bling, and others saw him as a tasteless parvenu.
I’m waiting for someone to make statues of Trump as Caesar and then get with the stabbity stab program. But, seriously, wouldn’t that combover look awesomely ridiculous in marble, with a gilt laurel crown? Of course, real marble would be wasted: hollow plastic would be more appropriate.
(sniffs) besides, if Trump were really cool, he’d have a unit of Chasseurs A Cheval De La Garde Imperial guarding him, in the full bling, sabres, and bearskin hats. Or perhaps the Neapolitan Guard ( https://www.pinterest.com/pin/556053885216524831/ )
Trump’s dictator style isn’t even George Lucas does Sith good. And that’s a low low bar.
Marcus:
Just wait…an artist somewhere will do that exact thing.