Which way, western man?

We deserve a better class of elitist tycoon

What would you do with all the money in the world?

I find it supremely distasteful that the most powerful tycoon and philanthropist of our times, Bill Gates, spends his time selling insect meat and handing out birth control in Africa. That might be just a matter of taste on my part.

Say what you want about the American robber barons, but figures like Mellon, Carnegie, Rockefeller built beautiful galleries and libraries, along with splashing out on money for medicine and education. Mellon famously bought Raphael`s masterpiece, the Alba Madonna, from the Soviets, to place in a public gallery in his native USA.

What better symbol for our age that, contra Mellon, Gates instead focuses on lab grown meat and prophylactics? (When he is not scheming to block out the sun with chalk particles - no joke.)

But this is not just a rant at the peculiar Bill - whose dizzying power over our lives is indeed something to be respected. No, something deeper and more urgent is signalled by this shift in philanthropy than mere distaste at the low level of Gates` aesthetics.

We live in an age of intense pragmatism - there is no real attempt at beauty in virtually any modern building. Classical beauty would be regarded as out of date, or … elitist. And our modern elites, despite having wealth which goes beyond the emperors of old, do not like to be so upfront about their grandeur. Their grandeur must be seen as being of the people - even as they put sweatshop workers to the grind to shore up their share prices.

Thus we do not have either the patrons or the artists to build new cathedrals or grand city halls, like you still see standing even in the small towns of South Africa today.

No, our great masterpieces are things like soccer stadiums. Compare even a modern train station even to one built a hundred years ago. What was it in these old societies that paid attention to the ornate detail of a train station`s facade when companies like Google subject their employees to the inanity of their Googleplex headquarters?

Again, say what you want about the history of the west and its elites, but the visual record of its art and architecture still stands as something which we moderns can only leer at as tourists. It is beyond us, too much for us. We could not even imagine doing something so daring, even if we had all the money in the world.

I do enjoy it when a figure like Elon Musk, who at least builds rockets and sports cars, mocks Gates and Bezos for their self-seriousness, but even he with his focus on Mars etc, does not come close to what I hope I would do with all the money in the world.

If we are to restore beauty to our towns and cities, it is the rich and powerful who will have to do it. And for that to happen, we require a rich and powerful less focused on the utiliarian, on the spreadsheet, and more on the privilege wealth affords in being given the opportunity for high deeds of aesthetics that live on for future generations.

Imagine each tycoon adopted a handful of towns and tore down the ugly boxes and noisy roads which carve up living space, and instead built central squares in a classical style. Imagine people still even thought of building concert halls and libraries, that were not just considered some kind of utility, but rather something a little bit sacred. Imagine a tycoon sponsoring grand works of art, instead of funding micro-lending in Bangladesh?

Do the wealthy of today lack any sense of glory and grandeur?!