Poor Little Rich Gays Carry on Dining While Whole Countries Crumble: Flint Cantor’s Art Event Dinner «

Poor Little Rich Gays Carry on Dining While Whole Countries Crumble: Flint Cantor’s Art Event Dinner

Thursday 4^th August 2011

What can we do? I can hardly breathe.

You remember that Esmé Manning was prostrate (or is it prostate?) with money worries last week in Normandy. It did turn out that she raised £1500 in the auction room (good silver tea service), the bank loan was granted, her home is worth £1.2 (as the Multis would say), with rental possibilities (the Multis’ absolute favourite of the investment options) and she’s got a good peni (or pension).

But, as Laura Malcolm said, We could all go at any moment. Matt Driver’s massive efficacy could suddenly shrivel away, property could crash, investments evap.

What are we to do? I’m worried sick. Southern Europe’s a massive debt suction-pump; and now America’s finished. It’s Tobago October 2008 all over again: in and out that little villa drawing room, telly on non-stop as those rows and rows of numbers turned red and hurtled backwards.

I don’t know that I can go through it all again.

On the other hand, Poor Little Rich Gays will make the most fuss before phoenix-ing forth more splendidly than anyone else.

Our outing to Deauville was a step in the right direction. One week later, it takes clear shape as a luxe-rejection gesture. The plate glass at Ralph Lauren and Hermès could be heard creaking then quietly shattering as we retreated. Esmé had said: ‘Plaid crap.’ Both of them just wailed, wordless at the misery of the Hermès scarves. Instead they found an unexpected source, just there in the middle of the beach, completely unsupervised, nobody trying to charge, of top quality grey mud and took £400 foot treatments for free. All as nature intended.

And what about Flint Cantor? You must have heard of him. His whole life is an art installation, massively publicised. He once opened the National Gallery in a dry cleaners, then he sold his life to start again.

He’s had his own self-induced credit crunch and Euro debt crisis. Now he’s living in an under-the-arches lock-up in Shoreditch, two narrow prongs of a magnet with the sleeping quarters in the connecting part. It might be nippy in the winter, but on a balmy night, with 40 dinner guests cascading into the hot, Carmen-style courtyard, exotic and luxurious. Massive national names were present: Arne Beringer, sculptor and painter, Elsa Hodgeman, the Gertrude Stein de nos jours (guess who was at the French chateau where she stayed last week? DAVID MILLIBAND. Hot in trunks.) Then there was the wild exaggeration of pin-stripe and cufflink that is the Multis and Prince Dmitri Hersov mixed in with the artists who mostly have nothing. But how the money-side diarised! So many art openings came to light for September.

What a scene! The whole dinner was an art work with a theme of childhood circling round love-bitten Flint as a wilfully created concept version of Don Juan. All the guests were talking about his ‘adventures’ after meeting themselves as illustrations on the plates (glazed too, not just slapped on) and on the table cloths. The walls were thick with Flint’s fierce, violently coloured, child-friendly paintings as well as those of a friend of his. For back-up were what you might call temporary artworks – rough card-board wendy houses, engagingly scrawled over and daubed and across the back wall a huge, riotious slab of painted cardboard.

It really was festive, with an undercurrent.

The food was the only normal aspect: lavish mixed meat starter (I’ve never seen Parma so heaped) and superb beef taxi-ed round from Flint’s sister (Beatrice Cantor’s) Aga. Lemon, though, was squeezed on with alarming freedom by the six-year-old waitresses (the artist’s own off-spring and relations) in excellent fitted uniforms.

We expected an outrage or to be hacked into at any moment by the News of the World. But only a table leaf collapsed. After dinner the child waitresses began urgently to produce artworks of their own and to sell them at prices varying from 2p to £1.50.

I ripped off the artist’s daughter by buying a double-sided work for £1. It really should have been £2.