France’s cultural excess is immoral (but I still love it)

For a committed, if unsuccessful, capitalist, I enjoy French culture an embarrassing amount – every last state-funded drop of it. Give me five-act operas with cast lists the size of a small Chinese city, give me obscenely expensive works of public art, give me inhumane concrete estates, give me unintelligible modernist music and I’ll be drooling with pleasure all night. In fact, I’m seeing a five-act French opera with a cast list the size of a small Chinese city tonight in Bordeaux. That’s the kind of disgusting thing I like to do.

In my defence, I am aware that what I am doing is immoral and what is being created should be consigned to hell. Fencing off this much tax revenue for works of art that will be enjoyed by the handful of people who can be bothered to sit through it is not funny or clever.

If art ever has to think about morality, it should at least think about costs.