Taste or tack?

[Fortis in Arduis]

When you survey the 500 or so objets d'art taken from the Lake Como villa of the late Gianni Versace - which will go under the hammer at Sotheby's in London on Wednesday - you realise he was a man of taste. Appalling taste.

Quite how someone of such grotesquely kitsch sensibilities came to be a byword for fashion and style must rank as one of the mysteries of our age.

When, in 1997, a deranged gunman shot him dead, aged 50, on the steps of his Miami mansion, he was the head of a style empire that was worth £576 million.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/ar...uy-ANY-it.html

[Psychonaut]

Is that an actual room or a showroom? Several of the individual pieces are quite tasteful, IMHO, but everything packed together in one room looks very gaudy and tacky.

[Osweo]

Hehe, before I read the text, I thought it was going to be about some boutique in Moscow, selling stuff to the nouveaux riches there! Very tacky, some pieces! And the oversized nature of most of it!

Come to think of it, I bet the Russian Oligarchy will figure prominently in the bidders!

[SPQR]

I agree with Psychonaut. I love a lot of those pieces, but all bunched together makes it look like a museum or something

[Æmeric]

Not my style. Sort of reminds me of some of those casinos in Vegas. Expensive but tastless. But who am I to say what is tasteful, I'm just an American bumpkin.

I prefer simpler designs like Early American or Amish.

[Fortis in Arduis]

I like the classical motifs, the gilding, the ebonising and the marble.

I like similar pieces which are in the Art Deco style.

I have a couple of Russian-made klismos chairs Greek-influenced like a cross between these two:



(they were part of a large 'music room' set which we had to sell)

and a couple of serpentine commodes with a good deal of marquetry and inlay:



Both are falling to pieces because of central heating and u-PVC window frames.

They come from a different design tradition to what Gianni collected, but I think that I like what Gianni collected.

I like the old country furniture too, and I have a large Chippendale Chinoiserie wardrobe (actually most of this stuff is now in America, leaving the flotsam to be recycled around the UK salerooms...) but it does not excite me from an aesthetical point of view, at all.

I think that Gianni knew what he liked and had an honest and consistent style which an older family collection could never really have.

I would happily sell the boring Chippendale wardrobe (which is not a family piece, just something that my grandfather bought during the last depression) and buy brand new neo-classical furniture from Italy.

That said, I cannot believe that people buy the modern machine-made stuff on the Tottenham Court Road in London for the prices that they do.

Heal's, once the cutting edge of design, sells absolute crap and there is a lot of refurbished French flea-market tat going around as well - for big money as well!

I think that the Daily Mail article is basically classist.

[lei.talk]

...in 1997, a deranged gunman shot him dead, aged 50, on the steps of his Miami mansion...

andy was not deranged.

i met him in a history class
at ucsd
more than two decades past.

he was a charming boy
in search of a father-figure
of whom he could be proud

and, consequently (to reassure his self),
borrowed money (needlessly) from me, frequently.

some times, he would repay the loan
with exactly the same hundred-dollar-bills
i had loaned him.

gianni and his coterie (pun intended)
made promises to andy
(he played the telephone messages for me).

their despicably predatory "use 'em and lose 'em" approach
to boys like andy
cost gianni his life, in this instance.

[Absinthe]

Some of them are tasteful, some are tacky, all of them put together in the same room is extremely tacky!!

Also, greek style statues belong to museums and archeological sites, not somebody's living room. I find the latter to be extremely tacky

[Vulpix]

It's tacky to have all of that in one house.

[Angharad]

I agree that it is too much for one home, even if it is a villa or palace.

I went to the Versace fashion/home stores when I was in Las Vegas, and I thought that they were some of the tackiest stuff I had ever seen.

Having money =/= taste.