Luxury Goods: Absolutely priceless

A couple of weeks ago I attended a reception in the Banqueting House on Whitehall to mark the opening of an exhibition by the American painter Cy Twombly at the Serpentine Gallery. A vast and lavish buffet was laid on tables down the length of Inigo Jones’s grandest room. Wealthy collectors drank champagne with Turner Prize-winning artists beneath Rubens’s only surviving ceiling. Lord Palumbo gave an exquisitely embarrassing speech in which — as has been widely reported — he repeatedly muddled the name of the principal guest, Cy Twombly, with that of the owner of Condé Nast, Si Newhouse (who was not there). Altogether, it was a highly satisfactory evening, and a neat demonstration of the power and prestige of art. There we all were, gathered in the room where Charles I once greeted ambassadors, in order to honour an artist whose finest work was derived from graffiti on walls and scribbles on blackboards.