The grand finale of the Bezos wedding was a pyjama party. Two hundred guests, among them Bill Gates, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ivanka Trump, and Tom Brady disembarked in the Arsenale, a medieval shipping yard that hosts the Venice Biennale art fair. Oprah Winfrey is pictured in a silk brown co-ord with feathered sleeves, stepping from the yacht, fan aloft. Kim Kardashian interpreted the Dolce Notte theme in a corset-inspired silk dress.
The photographs of diamonds and décolletage feel a little on the nose, as though the guests were actively cosplaying as their worst selves. Hell, Kris Jenner came dressed as Cruella De Vil. Forget quiet luxury, this is loud luxury – the kind that screams “money” in a tone-deaf falsetto, the kind that feels particularly off in the era of fires, floods and imminent famine in Gaza. The celebrations were punctuated by protests calling for Jeff and Lauren’s heads. The crowd carried banners with effigies of the couple. One sign featured a crown with a red X and the slogan “No Kings”.
Venice has always been a symbol of beauty and rot. One of the richest cities in the world during the Renaissance, its wealth came from mercantile capitalism – spice routes, silk trade, and a powerful navy that policed the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, the entire city was (and still is) built on wooden piles driven into a marshy lagoon. The buildings are rotting from below, sinking slowly into the sea. But Venice understands how to make decadence look divine, even as the water rises.
The last time the Arsenale got this much attention was in 2019. As part of the Venice Biennale, a giant rusted fishing boat was brought to shore. The vessel was the remnant of a tragedy in 2015, when almost 1,000 migrants perished while crossing from Libya to Lampedusa.
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The boat was meant to remind viewers of the 4,000 migrants who lost their lives in the Mediterranean that year. Instead, it became a disaster spectacle for the über-rich clientele. The artist, Christoph Büchel, was heavily criticised for diminishing, if not exploiting, the refugee crisis. Viewers paused to take selfies next to the rusted hull. “I imagine throngs of people – well-dressed, sipping spritzes – in front of a boat that, to me, is a coffin which held 700 people,” wrote Lorenzo Tondo at the time.
That same year, a crowded wharf gave way during a Biennale party, tipping dozens of guests into the canal as they waited to board a boat for the Prada event. The images of well-dressed patrons sliding into the murky water spawned unmasked glee and online schadenfreude. “The dozen guests were reportedly warned not to overcrowd the jetty,” Artnews wrote. “But their eagerness for free booze and hors d’oeuvres clearly took over.”
We’ve always had moments where wealth is out of step with the world, whether it’s tone-deaf art exhibitions or the sinking of the Titanic.
But what it reminds me most of is the excesses of Marie Antoinette. At a moment when the average French citizen was crippled by taxes, the rich – like Bezos – paid none. Marie was instead having her hair styled into a replica of the French warship La Belle Poole. If Louis XVI’s Austrian wife were alive today, she’d probably be the modern Lauren Sanchez, putting on “busty displays” for the tabloids, going live from her Orangery to cascades of guillotine emojis.
Everyday people buy crypto or hoard their pension stock, but the truly rich are building floating yachts in international waters and, like Bezos’s Blue Horizon project, financing their intergalactic exit strategies. So why is it so easy to watch these ostentatious displays at a time when so many people elsewhere in the world are literally scrambling for space in the lifeboats?
The outrage isn’t new, but maybe our reaction to it is. We’re no longer shocked by wealth itself – only by the spectacle of loud luxury. We watch, judge, meme and move on faster than it takes Amazon to deliver a Prime-day package. A brilliant corset, a million dollar yacht, a group of wealthy people swimming in the canal – these are now cultural as opposed to political moments.
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Instead of sparking a revolution, they become content. The content distracts us. We seethe over images of Bezos but the Amazon boxes keep landing on our doorsteps. “No kings,” say the protest signs. But we don’t abolish them. Instead, we follow them on Instagram.
