High life | 21 September 2017

As everyone who stands up when a lady enters the room knows, the once sacrosanct rules of civility throughout the West have all but disappeared. The deterioration in manners has been accelerated by the coming of the devil’s device, the dehumanising iPhone, as well as by phoney ‘art’ and artists such as Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons. I don’t know why, but Warhol is a bugbear of mine. He always treated me politely, featured me favourably in his magazine Interview, and referred to me in a good light in his diaries. Perhaps me being violent back then — he headlined a cover story with a reference to me being a terrorist among the rich — made him think twice before he stuck the knife in. Warhol ruined many lives by leading people astray with drugs and false promises, but most of all he ruined art by making it showy. The fact that today’s hustlers sell a picture of a Coke bottle or a shark suspended in formaldehyde for millions is obscene.