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They think it might cover, say, the Aspen, Colo., fan club that grew up two summers ago to celebrate Murderer Ted Bundy with, among other things, T shirts that read TED BUNDY is A ONE-NIGHT STAND. Or the work of Photographer Helmut Newton, who likes to sell high-fashion clothes with lurid pictures of women posed as killers and victims, or trussed up in sadomasochistic paraphernalia; one of his shots shows a woman's head being forced into a toilet bowl. The school of S-M fashion photography may, of course, be merely a passing putrefaction.
People informally play a game in which they compile lists of the most decadent acts now in practice. For horrific sensationalism, they might start with the idea of the snuff film (pornography in which an actress performing sex is actually murdered on screen). In the same awful category, they might include Viennese Artist Rudolf Schwarzkogler, who decided to make a modernist artistic statement by amputating, inch by inch, his own penis, while a photographer recorded the process as a work of art.
The list would have to mention Keith Richards, a member of the Rolling Stones, who, by one account, in order to pass a blood test to enter the U.S. for concert tours, had a physician drain his own heroin-tainted blood from his body and replace it with transfusions from more sedate citizens. Some of the sadomasochistic and homosexual bars in New York and San Francisco, with their publicly practiced urolagnia, buggery and excruciating complications thereof, would strike quite a few Americans as decadent.
In a less specialized realm, disco and punk songs like Bad Girls and I Wanna Be Sedated have a decadent ring. In fact, the entire phenomenon of disco has a certain loathsome glisten to it.
Extravagance has always been thought to have something to do with decadence. Some lists might mention Tiffany's $2,950 gold-ingot wristwatch, or a pair of $1,000 kidskin-and-gold shoes, or Harrods $1,900 dog collar, or Zsa Zsa Gabor's $ 150,000 Rolls-Royce with its leather, velvet and leopard interior. But be careful. Extravagance may actually be a sign of robustly vulgar good health. One can argue about such gestures as that of the 3rd century Roman Emperor Elagabalus, who once on a whim sent his slaves to collect 1,000 lbs. of cobwebs. They returned with 10,000 lbs. "From this," said Elagabalus, "one can understand how great is Rome." The Emperor would have enjoyed the Neiman Marcus catalogue, one of 20th century America's most fabulous menus of conspicuous consumption. The man who purchased His and Hers Learjets from the catalogue was helping to keep a lot of aircraft workers employed.
Decadence is a subjective word, a term of moral and psychological recoil. It expresses quite exactly those things that the speaker finds most awful, most repugnant, most dangerous and, as a Freudian might point out, most interesting. So a question arises: Are aberrant tastes decadent in themselves? Does the decadence consist in the fact that such tastes can now be openly practiced and even tolerated? Surely, tolerance is not decadence, unless it is a symptom of moral obliviousness.