Tweed Courthouse

What does luxury do?  Many things, I'm sure.

Sometimes luxury glows: Tut's golden funeral mask really would be less beautiful without its precious materials and workmanship, indeed without its pharonic coiffure and false beard - that is, shorn of its branding.  But it takes centuries to entomb the cultural ugliness of the artifact and centuries more for the patina of patrimony to develop. 

Contemporary luxury glows best when it is, actually, popular.  The British royal wedding was luxurious in a way that designed for masses to luxuriate in it, and was thus a distant and effective cousin to well-appointed public parks, which were meant to be, in the old fashioned phrase, elevating.  But all this must be done carefully and, forgive me, by the right people.  Misappointed luxury is a mess, enjoyable only as a shtick: Dame Edna.  A showman's luxury is for a simpler, sometimes dirtier, cultural phase: Frédérick Lemaître (as portrayed), with his dandified cane and coat, Liberace, drug pushers with their diamond-capped teeth.

So, often, luxury sickens: little need be said here, except that sickening luxury is a winking, syphilitic thing, beguiling even as it pustulates.  A crust of jewels is often a social crime that almost as often half-hides, half-advertises the actual crimes leading to acquisition.  The manicured, coiffed, neurotic, primped and pimped dog - a symbol of personal, social and moral disorder - Trouble.

Usually, luxury asserts: it is a kind of boldness, or big-toothed smile, or warning.  And that is half of why luxury sells: it promises to sell you.  The nicest paper we buy is to print our resumes on.

Sometimes luxury coddles: sensitivities - real or imagined, natural or acquired, rational or affected - are recognized and dealt with.  The incredibly soft scarf occasionally adorns an incredibly sensitive neck, like a dressing of gauze.  More often, such scarves eventually render the neck more sensitive.  In either case, luxury is a thing to be consumed, to cozy up in, to hold and squeeze as a child does a teddy bear.  That is the other half of why luxury sells: it is a little ball of ownable comfort, occasionally excused as an investment.  Luxury in this very common form is a teddy bear, and usually as infantile.  Lotions.

And thus, luxury often teaches: the needs and tastes implied by luxury are taught deliciously, because indirectly.  Why should there be swans in the lake? Why shouldn't there be steak sauce on the table?  Why are courtrooms expensively appointed?  What is the blindness that necessitates revolution?  There is much to be learned in art musuems, and an important minority of the lessons on offer from art - especially the applied arts - are the lessons of luxury.

Always, luxury signals: any of the foregoing.