Bezos wedding in Venice: no limits for the super-rich?
Multi-billionaire and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos married Lauren Sánchez in Venice on the weekend in a three-day wedding extravaganza. While the rich and famous guests partied protected by heavy security, there were protests against the mega celebration, which cost an estimated ten million dollars. The Venice authorities defended the event as a PR coup for the lagoon city. Europe's press has been unsparing in its criticism.
Uninspiring and monotonous
The Neue Zürcher Zeitung is unenthusiastic:
“Venice! Why does it always have to be the lagoon city? The backdrop against which countless other big shots of this world have said 'I do'? And why does Bezos also blindly follow the laws of accumulation? More, bigger, more expensive? ... There seems to be a great deal of pressure to conform among the super-rich. Even Jeff Bezos apparently wants to be nothing more than a billionaire among billionaires, a VIP among other VIPs. ... In any case, the 'wedding of the year' is not inspiring in any way, neither culturally nor aesthetically.”
Shameless showing off
The Frankfurter Rundschau turns away in disgust:
“The revelry in Venice shows that we have relapsed into a pre-modern era. Jeff Bezos' childish display of his immeasurable wealth is like the final piece of a puzzle that fits into a bigger picture including Donald Trump's fact-free self-promotion, Vladimir Putin's aggressive imperialism and the Iranian mullahs' cynical denial of the world and the truth. The world is burning, because almost everywhere the wrong people are in power and because they support each other. The first step must be that we at least deny them any admiration.”
Europeans abhore ostentation
Bezos has no idea how inappropriate such a display of wealth appears to Europeans, writes the Irish Independent:
“This carnival of conspicuous consumption - at a time when public frustration about over-tourism, housing shortages and cost-of-living woes all feed into a sense of growing social instability across Europe - seems almost deliberately calculated to provoke. ... Ostentatious displays of extreme wealth don't typically go down well in Europe, a complex agglomeration of nation states with painful overlapping histories of monarchy, authoritarianism and empire, and with generational waves of social upheaval stretching back over millennia. As a result, showy extravagance is implicitly understood as at best risky and at worst as incitement to violence.”