Word: riches
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...every legitimate excavation like Tepe Zargaran, there are many more ransacked in search of treasures destined for the living rooms of rich collectors. The vast plain of Ai Khanoum, once the easternmost center of ancient Greek culture, is pockmarked with thousands of looter pits, some still containing fragments of clay or shattered lumps of marble - remnants of statues that didn't survive the excavation process. There is little left of the Corinthian columns that once lined the city's main thoroughfare, though at least two of the elaborately carved pedestals can be found at a nearby restaurant, where they form...
Perhaps you've heard: The very rich are not like you and me. Oh, they're feeling the impact of the financial crisis and watching their portfolios, if not their pennies. Just not so much that they're willing to bypass a rare opportunity to pay $37.7 million for a Brancusi statue or $46.4 million for a Matisse...
Aren't we through with the rich by now? Not even close. When big news happens, pop culture tends to react in an opposite way to what media executives and pundits predict. After 9/11, people predicted the end of irony, trash TV and screen violence; we got Stephen Colbert, The Bachelor and 24. The opulent soap Dynasty became a hit amid the massive early-'80s recession; in the Great Depression, movies like Gold Diggers of 1933 packed theaters...
...even as networks are casting working-class sitcoms for fall, Bravo is cashing in on the rich. Bravo began life as a cable arts channel, but like artists of old, it discovered the utility of wealthy patrons. From Project Runway to the Real Housewives franchise (about well-off couples in New York City; Orange County, California; Atlanta; and soon New Jersey), it remade itself with reality TV about upscale consumerism...
There's plenty of consumption porn on Bravo--Rolexes, cars, vacation homes. But at the heart of it is a specific 21st century definition of luxury: middle-class people buy stuff; rich people buy services. When talismans of indulgence become widespread--lattes, iPhones, etc.--what distinguishes the truly well-to-do is their ability to pay others to do things...