i-made-it-leonardo - The Monday Morning Memo

DISCOVERED IN
THE VATICAN LIBRARY,
SEPTEMBER, 2006

According to a notation written by Alesso Baldovinetti,
an accountant who was on the scene in 1497,
just as Leonardo Da Vinci began sketching the
human figures on the wall of the Sistine Chapel that
would eventually become his famous painting,
The Last Supper, he said,

“Va bene, tutti coloro che vogliono essere nel dipinto,
salire sul lato opposto del tavolo”

(All right, everyone who wants to be in the painting,
get on the far side of the table.)

AM I MAKING THIS UP?

YES NO

“‘Highly educated, curious, ironic, wittily countercultural, X people tend to underdress for social occasions,’ Fussell wrote. ‘They know the best wine stores and delis. They have risen above the muck of mainstream culture to a higher, hipper sensibility.’ The chapter about X people was insufferably self-regarding, but Fussell was onto something.

Every once in a while, in times of transformation, a revolutionary class comes along and disrupts old structures, introduces new values, opens up economic and cultural chasms. In the 19th century, it was the bourgeoisie, the capitalist merchant class. In the latter part of the 20th century, as the information economy revved up and the industrial middle class hollowed out, it was X people.

Seventeen years later, I wrote a book about that same class, Bobos in Paradise. The bobos didn’t necessarily come from money, and they were proud of that; they’d secured their places in selective universities and in the job market through drive and intelligence exhibited from an early age, they believed. X types deemed themselves as rebels against the staid elite. They were—as the classic Apple commercial had it—“the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers.” But by 2000, the information economy and the tech boom were showering the highly educated with cash. They had to find ways of spending their gobs of money while showing they didn’t care for material things. So they developed an elaborate code of financial correctness to display their superior sensibility. Spending lots of money on any room formerly used by the servants was socially defensible: A $7,000 crystal chandelier in the living room was vulgar, but a $10,000, 59-inch AGA stove in the kitchen was acceptable, a sign of your foodie expertise. When it came to aesthetics, smoothness was artificial, but texture was authentic. The new elite distressed their furniture, used refurbished factory floorboards in their great rooms, and wore nubby sweaters made by formerly oppressed peoples from Peru.

The bobos have coalesced into an insular, intermarrying brahmin elite that dominates culture, media, education, and tech.”

- David Brooks, How the Bobos Broke America, The Atlantic, Sept 2021

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