The New Clothes of Andrea Bonaceto
So there I was in the glam surroundings of the Soho Hotel, umming and arring about watching the new Stacey Dooley doc on the magnificent priest, Mina Smallman, and the humanity defeating circumstances that engulfed two of her lovely daughters, when I decided, like all males gifted with our typical and unfailing ability to avoid all possible personal discomfort, to grab a couple of coffees and leg it.
That free’d up time for another coffee – outside on the terrace at Dean Street Town House if you want the real world detail – and a mild twinge in the life expectancy meter that there must be something more worthwhile to do.
Aha! Of course!
Being an in demand recipient of London’s every cutting edge press release, I knew that just up the road, at Flannel’s flagship store, there was, this very morning, a photocall for Andrea Bonaceto, ‘one of the worlds most successful blockchain pioneers and NFT artists’.
My mission then was clear! I gulped down the last sip of stone cold caffeine and rushed excitedly up Dean Street, past the promise of the new TCR station (and a reassuring number of freshly refurbished, soon to open, stores) and arrived at 161-167 Oxford Street. It was (is) a clothes shop. A posh one, (one where emperors and sultans might shop) but a clothes shop none the less. There were clothes in it. Lots. Not for want of looking I could not however see an NFT anywhere (not that I was sure in all candour what I was looking for). There was also clearly no photocall then – or any time soon.
You’ve guessed, you clever reader of runes, you. There was to be a photocall – but not now. It was going to be set up down stairs – but not now. The date was right, even the time, but not now. And probably not today, in the real world – not now.
So I had rushed, intent on bringing you, my reader, the latest and greatest in NFT artistry, only to find it concealed, invisible, a virtual promise. Rather like a non-fungible token. Or a bitcoin. Or the lovely clothes the emperor was wearing. Or God.
So perhaps I should have embraced the suffering of Southend’s former Archdeacon and those around her and braved the screening after all. It was real, however horribly, whatever we did to wish it away. So I’ll watch the broadcast, privately, like everyone else, and I’ll scream at the screen and wonder, like all males who do little, why nothing in the real world ever seems to change.
By Chris Parkinson