Expensive Shit

Last week I had a meal in Shanghai with a company with whom we may do business. They were paying but we ordered the food, and the other company’s head guy wanted us to order the shark’s fin soup. This is not because shark’s fin soup tastes good – it doesn’t. It’s like thick hair in gravy. The point was that he wanted to show us respect by ordering something expensive, and this is a key point when doing business in China. It doesn’t matter whether the food tastes good or not – often in a formal business dinner the food is symbolic.

This is a revelation that suddenly makes sense of the cuisine over here. You ask yourself why anyone would choose to eat frog ovaries, duck tongues or dog penises, and why anyone would drink the gall bladder juice of a snake. The answer is that these foods are exotic and therefore expensive; everyone knows this, including your guest, so ordering them sends a signal that you value the guest and respect them. (Actually, I’m not sure dog penis is considered a compliment – you might want to check this before presenting your honored guest with a Labrador dick).

This may seem stupid – eating crap that doesn’t taste good just to show respect – but it’s nowhere near as stupid as what wealthy people do with art. The modern art world is often about buying stuff that looks crap just to show how wealthy you are. I was looking at some pictures in a hotel meeting room here that had been made by splattering paint over a large canvas. They were indistinguishable from anything done by Jackson Pollock, a five-year-old, or a man with a paint brush in the midst of an epileptic seizure. The only reason people pay a fortune for modern art shit is that it enables them to signal to other, similar wankers how sophisticated and wealthy they are. Take the signature off the picture and they wouldn’t be interested. Give them a perfect copy and they wouldn’t want it – it’s not about how it looks, only the ability to show off to other tossers.

Wine is the same way. I know of a blind tasting where the participants selected the cheapest wine as their favorite; however, when the truth was revealed, everyone went back to drinking the expensive stuff because it didn’t matter about the taste, it was just important to show that you were sophisticated enough to tell the “good” stuff from what the common person might like. I think this is what is known in the trade as “being a twat”.

This brings me to watches. I just got back from a visit to a Chinese market that specializes in fake branded merchandise. If I had a dollar for every time I was asked if I wanted to buy a watch I could have bough a real Rolex, and probably a real BMW in which to drive it to the hotel. Why would anyone buy a fake Rolex? The main purpose of having a Rolex seems to be to show that you are wealthy and classy; the only signal sent by a fake Rolex is that you are cheap and tacky. Besides, the fucking thing’s probably going to break in a month. You can buy an excellent watch for $50 that will look good, run perfectly and last for years. And you don’t have to bargain with a wrinkled man in a market to get it. Whether it’s food, art, wine or watches, what they buy is, for many people, more driven by the image they are trying to create than what will actually bring them pleasure.

Now that’s off my chest I’m going to dinner. I fully intend to eat the normal body parts of animals tonight; there’s no-one going that I have to impress. I’m having the twelve-year-old scotch though. I’m not having anyone think I’m the kind of low-rent meths-drinker who can’t tell the difference…


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison