Vulgarity now

New Yorkers' obsession with DC, a $31 million hippo and the world's most expensive camel

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Welcome back to Pursuits Weekly, our look at the world's biggest culture stories, as well as ideas and recommendations around travel, dining and art. Sign up here to get this newsletter every Saturday in your inbox. Pedestrian crossing Tiffany Trump's off-the-shoulder emerald velvet frock "was about as fancy as it got" at the 2025 Kennedy Center Honors, according to the New York Times. Photographer: Taylor Hill/Getty Images The insight that struck me hardest this week came from Bloomberg's Nikki Waller, who texted me "you know DC is winning because New Yorkers can't shut up about DC's flaws." Certainly there's a lot of indignation to go around. Exhibit A is FIFA, which took over Washington's imploding Kennedy Center for three weeks, from Nov. 24 to Dec. 12. The high point of that period, or possibly the low point, was the official World Cup draw on Dec. 5. USA Today declared it the cringiest draw ever; the Boston Globe agreed it was "garish and cringy", and SB Nation called it "the world's worst, most embarrassing, sycophantic mess." Exhibit B is the new East Wing of the White House, which threatens to "overwhelm the White House itself," per an open letter from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, "and may also permanently disrupt the carefully balanced classical design of the White House." Architect Magazine pulled fewer punches still, calling it a "horrendous" "monument to vanity." Exhibit C is American Canto, the new memoir by DC journalist Olivia Nuzzi that, per The New Yorker, "refuses chronology and coherence". The Guardian called it "insufferable filler"; the Washington Post, "a scramble of fragments ... highly uneven and largely forgettable"; the New York Times, "a pretentious mess." You get the picture. The general vibe that barbarians are making our whole culture dumber is not confined to inside-the-Beltway news. Indeed, it only intensified after the algorithm-wielding tech bros at Netflix announced it was spending $83 billion to buy Warner Brothers, the auteur-friendly studio that released all of Stanley Kubrick's films from 1971 onwards — and that also owns the beloved HBO. Hollywood immediately went into what Vanity Fair described as "full-blown panic mode," with director James Cameron saying it would be a "disaster" and actor Jane Fonda warning that the merger threatens both democracy "and the First Amendment itself." Not that anybody particularly seemed to prefer the foremost alternative, represented by Paramount Skydance's hostile bid, backed by Saudi money and Jared Kushner. All of which represents an effective reversal of what Australian critic A.A. Phillips identified in a famous 1950 essay as the "cultural cringe." Phillips's idea was that if you work in cultural production and live in somewhere like Washington or Australia, you instinctively consider yourself inferior to the the cognoscenti in London or New York. Today, however, it's the self-appointed elites who are on the back foot, dismayed at their inability to provide any kind of check on what they view as the uncultured vulgarity of the ascendant regime. Meanwhile, both MAGA and Silicon Valley have made it abundantly clear that they only care about bien-pensant opinion insofar as they can take great pleasure in ridiculing and deriding it. Perhaps that's what Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos intimated to Donald Trump during their meeting last month: that the best way to trigger the libs would be to rubber-stamp his acquisition of Warner Brothers. What red-blooded president could resist instigating such an outcome? In a Trump-centric world, perhaps the outcome of the Warner Brothers sale will end up hinging on which bidder can annoy New Yorkers the most. By the numbers 18%: The proportion of all work hours that are likely to be assisted by AI in 2030, per "superforecaster" Philip Tetlock, up from 2% in 2024. 41%: The year-on-year increase in November sales at Caractère in Notting Hill. It's a prime example of how London's restaurants are bustling this holiday season. 81.81: The number of points received by Immelen 2021, a white wine from the Kullabergs vineyard in Sweden, making it the winner among 24 entries in a blind tasting held last year in Koenigsegg. The 2022 vintage is being served this year at the official Nobel Banquet. Yes, Sweden is the new unlikely land of wine, per Lars Paulsson, Anton Wilen and Jonas Ekblom. $575: The price of a Harding heritage wool overcoat from Pendleton. It will "make you feel like you can endure a deep Montana winter with the panache of Clint Eastwood," writes Madison Darbyshire in her Western Gift Guide. ₱700: The cost of a salad of fiddlehead ferns with avocado oil at M Dining + Bar, one of our Five Top Tables in Manila, penned by Nicole Sy. That's just under $12. $900,000: The amount that philanthropist Sonya Yu gave to MoMA PS1, the contemporary art museum in Queens, to make admission free for the next three years. $7,166,000,000: The amount given away by MacKenzie Scott over the past year. Death of a starchitect Frank Gehry's iconic Guggenheim Bilbao. Photographer: Joaquin Gomez Sastre/Getty Images Frank Gehry, who died last Friday at the age of 96, was the OG starchitect, the man who was singlehandedly responsible, or so the popular story went, for the revitalization of Bilbao, formerly a depressed Spanish rust-belt city and now a major tourist destination. It's worth noting therefore that in a 2017 interview with the Guardian, Gehry declared the much-vaunted Bilbao Effect to be "bullshit." And indeed, today, the whole starchitect phenomenon has largely waned, after a series of high-profile faceplants such as Peter Eisenman's City of Culture in Santiago de Compostela. Contemporary buildings, with notable exceptions, tend to focus more on community and sustainability, with less of an emphasis on what British architect David Chipperfield described in a 2008 interview as "the extraneous and the superficial" and "things that look silly after a few years." Since 2016, for instance, China has officially banned "weird architecture." Certainly when it comes to residences, the plutocrat class can be very conservative: They much prefer the sober neoclassicism of Robert A. M. Stern, who also died recently, to anything that looks too flashy. A $31 million hippo François-Xavier Lalanne's Hippopotame Bar, 1976 Source: Sotheby's François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne have come to occupy a unique position in the art market, and not just because they pretty much have a lock on making functional furniture that looks like animals. 20 years ago, Les Lalanne were beloved and quirky furniture designers — collectible, to be sure, and expensive, but still very far from being megastars. In June 2005, a bar made by François-Xavier in the shape of a large carp set a new auction record for the artist at a relatively modest $200,000. Then, in 2009, the art and design collection of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé came to auction and raised an astonishing €374 million ($484 million) in one night, and the auction record for Lalanne jumped from $390,000 to $2.8 million. More recently, a massive 2019 sale of the artists' own collection grossed $101 million, including a $6 million writing table in the shape of a rhinoceros. By 2021, in the wake of exhibitions at both Versailles and the Clark Museum, the artists' auction record had risen to $9.6 million. In 2023, it spiked to $19.4 million, also for a rhino. Now a hippo, complete with revolving bottle rack, ice bucket, hors-d'oeuvre tray and glassware storage, has bested the rhino, setting a new record of $31.4 million at Sotheby's on Wednesday. The auction house calls it "a masterwork of functional whimsy." It certainly falls broadly into the category of "inoffensive and decorative trophies to be enjoyed and lived with" that I wrote about last month. Combine this hippopotamus with a pretty Klimt, and you have the perfect Christmas present for the billionaire who has everything. Photograph of the week Photographer: Justin Clemons/Netflix The second Netflix House opened this week in the former Belk department store anchoring the Galleria Dallas mall in Texas. When Sarah Holder visited the first Netflix House last month, she found "a space that sits somewhere on the continuum between a high-concept Disneyland attraction and a suburban theme restaurant like Dave & Buster's." Quote of the week "Owning the world's most expensive camel one day would be a beautiful full-circle moment — something fun, something meaningful and something that excites me." —Paul Pogba, once the world's most expensive footballer, upon becoming a shareholder in a professional camel racing team. New for subscribers: Free article gifting. Bloomberg.com subscribers can now gift up to five free articles a month to anyone you want. Just look for the "Gift this article" button on stories. (Not a subscriber? Unlock limited access and sign up here. We're improving your newsletter experience and we'd love your feedback. If something looks off, help us fine-tune your experience by reporting it here. 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