I overheard a flight attendant behind me arranging to meet her colleague. “We’re on Rodeo Drive,” she boomed into her phone, “in front of Cartier.” I turned from the window to see her. I didn’t recognise her uniform, but I took her for cabin crew on a national flag carrier: Swiss International Air Lines AG, maybe. In her pencil skirt and full beat, she stood as an avatar for what now must be only a nostalgia for the glamour of air travel, a reminder of what you could have had, had you been born a generation or two earlier. I imagined her lighting my cigarette and handing me my folded newspaper with a courteous smile. Behind her, the contemporary air traveller gathered; sliders with socks, hooded leisurewear, velour tracksuits. The reality of the moment did little to take the shine off the vision of a better past that the older, prestige airlines still sell. I wondered whether I really wanted that past.
Turning back to the window of Cartier, I looked through at the wares on display. Nobody could deny that they were, in purely formal, material terms, most beautiful. Cut into baguettes, pears and marquise, the diamonds seemed to catch the sparkle of the overhead LED lamps that illuminated the departure lounge, their shimmer given depth by the setting sun across the runway, its warm beams occasionally eclipsed by a departing wide-bodied airliner. Ascending soundlessly into the skies behind the triple-glazed observation windows, I realised through watching their silhouettes that I could not trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, even if I wanted to. My reflection in the window was bootless indeed, bootless without remedy, as I saw my own dilapidated outfit, a pair of sports shorts and a faded old black t-shirt onto which had been embroidered the Very Hungry Caterpillar. Across his body was that watchword of revolutionary action: EAT THE RICH. They were the apocryphal words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Genevan Enlightenment philosopher: ‘When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.’ I stood there, a temporarily embarrassed millionaire, and chuckled to see his words super-imposed against the diamonds, the handbags, the eyeglasses and watches. I imagined him in his wig, strolling around his Calvinist hometown, thinking about reason. I guess they must sell a lot of sunglasses, I thought. Surely they can’t be selling many diamonds.
Do you think they’re easy to steal? My friend, an accomplished thief, once told me that airports were a shoplifter’s paradise, and that he would pay for his flight many times over with what he fingered in the duty-free. We were in a pub in South London at the time. I handed over twenty-five quid for a North Face jacket that I still have, in great condition except for a little tear on the right pocket zipper where he pulled out the security tag. But jewellery? Diamonds? Surely not. In fact, I’m sure the display models are just cut glass. Come to think of it, who’s to say they even stock any real ones in the sweltering stockrooms underneath Heathrow Terminal 5 at all? After all, who would drop €40,000 on a pendant necklace in a transit hub between Hounslow and Staines at 6am? It’s all window-dressing, isn’t it, window-dressing for a peculiar political economy that prides itself on an enlightened self-interest, on reason, while trading on some fucked desires. Airside Cartier doesn’t exist to sell diamonds, but to sell its real clientele to us. It’s not enough for them to own diamonds, they must also know that we want them too. The airport storefront offers us a fantasy of a golden age of luxury air travel, and its real customers the knowledge that they are envied. They can sell it with feeling.
On YouTube a short video is fed to me. It’s from a marketing professional, nay, a genius, I’m led to believe, who has cornered the market of shorts explaining the amazing tricks of the marketing profession. “Rolls Royce and Maserati stopped selling their cars at car shows because a €300,000 car looks really expensive. They started selling them at plane shows and yacht shows. If you’ve been looking at Learjets all afternoon, a €300,000 car is basically an impulse buy.” He’s wrong, surely. The €300,000 Maserati is at the airshow so its new owner can tell themselves that this is the car that Learjet owners buy, and one day, I too will be that rich. They’re Maserati sunglasses sold by proximity to Learjet necklaces. The YouTube short moves on to an advertisement for home insurance. It’s profoundly reassuring to realise that, no matter how rich you get, there’s always something more to want.
The window display’s careful arrangement of goods looked beautiful to me. Visual Merchandising is the most direct form of art, I think. The first department stores that emerged in France and England in the middle of the 19th century were really a revolutionary break of the firewall between culture and shopping; the ability to browse goods without the leering oversight of a haughty shopkeeper turned the stores into galleries, real galleries. With goods displaying fixed prices on visible tags, one could have the comforting reassurance of knowing one couldn’t afford it, but could still enjoy it nonetheless. With the department store came the department store window, and a new arena of the aesthetic onto which the homosexual could assert his dominance, seducing the shopper into his world. He couldn’t buy these goods any more than you could, but in his art he can show his appreciation in a way you never could.
All laid out like this, I thought of the work of one of my favourite painters, Clara Peeters. A Flemish painter, her works are almost entirely still life composition realised in a rich palette on a dark ground. The subject is usually food; on silver platters and in gold tazzas, in porcelain dishes and gilt goblets, cheeses and oranges and fish and wine and olives and bagels and pies are meticulously depicted. The food looks appetisingly simple now, but when they were painted, during the era of the Spanish Netherlands and the early Dutch Republic, they were as clear a sign of wealth as the glittering silverware. These were the fruits of expansion: of the expansion of commerce, of new financial instruments making the Dutch rich, and the expansion of territory, reinvesting their profits from herring futures into colonialism, finding new worlds to conquer and then eat. Peeters was a forerunner of Pronkstilleven, a form of Dutch still life painting which brought together all these high-value consumer goods and preserved them in paint for the owners, a way of displaying their wealth. Yet at the same time they were, ostensibly, a way for the emergent bourgeoisie to highlight their piety and moral standing. The comestibles featured were intended as metaphors for the fragility and transience of our worldly life, a vanitas that, at the same time, preserved the frangible porcelain and rotting fruit in durable oils. Talk about having your cake and eating it too. The turn towards the depiction of consumer goods over, say, Christ and the Saints, or your beloved offspring, was a consequence of the Reformation that had been spreading across Europe for the previous two centuries. In contrast to the papist Spanish who had controlled the Netherlands, the Dutch Republic and its denizens embraced Calvinism, and with it, its historical suspicion of the image. But food, Calvin believed, was a gift from God to be enjoyed; soon, these rich depictions of their material wealth, cloaked in their sheen of spiritual continence, became the perfect way for the wealthy to mark themselves out to their peers. To paint it was to own it, not just as a representation, but as a relationship with the world.
Following the teachings of the Zürcher theologian Zwingli, and the Genevan Calvin, the reformers that sprang from Switzerland concerned themselves with the destruction of images that depicted the holy, in favour of a more direct sense of the connection with God being a direct relationship, not one that needed mediation through worldly objects. I value that iconoclasm. It has a lot to teach us, which is why iconoclasm is one of a handful of still-existing sins. Things can be broken as easily as relationships. Today, the depiction of the worldly object has itself become the relationship that structures our world and our relations with others. It has become more than a God, but a whole creation too. So give us your diamonds. What we can’t fuck, we’ll eat.
– Huw Lemmey