Word: elagabalus
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...that everyone did everything to Basquiat, turning him into the all-purpose, inflatable martyr figure of recent American art. Mainly, they loaded him with more money than he knew what to do with and more praise than he could handle; the art market, like the ceiling of the Emperor Elagabalus, opened and smothered him in tons of roses. Some martyrdom...
...messier and more full-blooded fault, a form of generosity, almost, but one that has come unhinged. Ideally, world-class plundering should try to pay its way as entertainment. The Romans had a genius for transforming loot into colossally vulgar display, ostentation on an imperial scale. The Emperor Elagabalus, it is said, ordered his slaves to bring him 10,000 lbs. of cobwebs. When they finished the task, Elagabalus observed, "From this, one can understand how great a city is Rome." Louis XIV of France wore a diamond-covered coat that, at the turn of the 18th century, was worth...
...perhaps the most endearing virtue of big spenders is that they are wonderfully entertaining. There is nothing like them. If a conga line could be made up extending from Qin Shihuang and Elagabalus, through Hearst, the sheiks and Allan Carr, we would need no Broadway shows. It is not just their poly urethane clouds and disco chambers; it is their hilarious innocence, their religious concentration on themselves. What's more, they rarely know how entertaining they are. Nero, for example, when he entered his Golden House with its statue of him self, 120 feet high, and its private lake...
...similar trend marked Rome long before its fall. Juvenal decried the ubiquity of foppish, feminine, perfumed males. Elagabalus appeared publicly in women's clothes. Caesar was likened to "every man's wife and every woman's husband"; Antony had a harem of men and women; and Nero is thought to have married a castrated male...
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