We live in a world in crumbling decay, a world where the Élysée bestows the Legion of Honor upon a minor Pharrell Williams a man once condemned in New York for mistaking homage for a photocopier, plundering Marvin Gaye’s genius. A world where medals are handed out like metro tickets, at the speed of a Shinkansen at full throttle, and now it’s Beckham’s turn, adorned with the Order of Arts and Letters—= she who has never stitched a dress nor sketched anything beyond the arch of an eyebrow. But after Jacquemus, why not?

In truth, this is a world that collapses without even the decency to do so gracefully. A world where the utterly mediocre are hoisted to honor, where color is slathered on like plaster, where reality is hacked apart with a trowel so that everything shines, so that everything explodes in the end like Bolotnikov’s rebellion. We nitpick the elephant, atomize good taste, and ultimately inflict upon the mind’s eye the same pain as sunlight glinting off a sheet of tin. Vulgarity is never beautiful, and repainting it does not ennoble itit only makes it louder.

There are already enough vulgar things in this world, enough “Lipanare,” without needing to swell further the overwhelming tide of this nauseating, mundane mediocrity. Behold the new masters, fattened on the brains of others. They hide behind truculent paradoxes, hollow axioms, pseudo-revolutionary bellowing, and ill-bred brutality. They trample every received idea, and it sometimes worksoften, in fact. But for whom? For the hyenas of posthumous fashion, busy gnawing at the carcasses of dead lions.

Here are the last swan songs, reduced to the quacks of ducks. And you, wretched copyist expiating in this purgatory of letters, you whose soul, drained by some cruel irony, is stripped to the marrow of that sacred fire called talent! Oh, poor wretch, obsessed with gnawing at a barren idea like a convict scratching at a festering wound, hoping to tear out some gnawing parasite, that insidious usurper of the mind, which never took residence upon your brow, yet installs itself there as a tyrant eternal and voracious! And the world that applauds deserves at least one thing: our irony.

FM