Right place, wrong time

I can't afford to get too excited about megayachts. Last week, however, I found myself taking a detour from my daily walk to stare long and hard at a marvellous dark green titan berthed at the Vittoriosa marina. Even next to her with the on-board chopper and the thousand plasma screens, Maìn stood out. It may sound slightly odd to call a floating cathedral minimalist, but minimalist she was. Slick lines, no fuss, no fancy colours or nautical hardware in polished brass - a plain 65 metres of seamless beauty. Little wonder, for Maìn belongs to a man with something of an eye for understated elegance.

Trouble is Giorgio Armani didn't seem to like us. Here he was, moored just below a historical maritime city in its Sunday best (it was the feast of St Lawrence, and some special commemoration at that), and he was gone overnight apparently without as much as bothering to break the boat's clean lines by taking some fresh air on deck. How could one be so aloof? Surely, the whole point of great wealth is to indulge the senses with things diverse? It can't have been the location, for Armani has a holiday home on nearby Pantelleria. Was it then the fireworks? But no, I'm sure the $50 million bill for Maìn included soundproofing. I've come to the conclusion that it was the aesthetics that undid us.

Take the bandstand. The piazza was agog with talk of the new planċier and how it has been hand-built over several years by Maltese and Roman craftsmen. Who cares about Maìn when you can have bronze busts of all the great composers, a gallery of scenes from operas, gaudy candlesticks the size of small trees, and scores of gilded and marbleized panels - all in a few metres of brazen display? Then there was the new baldachin, a scarlet behemoth that took a gang of strapping Vittoriosa youth days to put up; and the statues, and the columns, and the bunting... Actually I'm sure that our minimalist mogul was advised by medics to keep his age in mind and not venture anywhere near the festa. A heart attack is the last thing you need when you're rich.

I'm not saying which I think is the more beautiful, Armani or the external festivities committee design. The problems with judging taste are twofold: first, one is usually really talking class, which is both annoying and snobbish; second, no matter how chic one waxes, one will always be trumped by the classier (there we go) still.

Rather, what I find fascinating is that ritual architecture, furniture and decoration in contemporary Malta seems stuck with a very particular idiom. A sort of composite of baroque, rococo, and neoclassical, which at this time of year takes over our streets.

Two years ago I supervised an enterprising student from the Faculty of Architecture who decided to interview band club dilettanti about their aesthetic choices. The young man was understandably amazed. After years of studying Bauhaus, Mies, Foster, and what have you, he found himself looking at brand new buildings that looked like something out of a 19th century sketchbook. What's more, he found that there was nothing retro or revivalist about the intentions of their makers - it was simply a matter of obvious choice, as they put it.

Why then this time warp? The clue is in the question. There are two related reasons why dilettanti keep replicating the same designs.

The first has to do with tradition, or, as historian Eric Hobsbawm famously put it, the invention of tradition. There is no such thing as a pure aesthetics - all ideas of beauty are linked up with notions of history, memory, aspiration, and so on. In the case of dilettanti, what we see is an aesthetic of memory.

The Vittoriosa bandstand is beautiful also because it looks old - paradoxically, it is said to have a timeless beauty about it. It is interesting that dilettanti rarely if ever commission artists to create; instead, they pay craftsmen to copy. The royal family of festa commissions, the Camilleri Cauchis, are a case in point (honest, I say this without a hint of disdain).

Given that Maltese festa is so much about tradition and factional legacy, it makes sense for dilettanti to seek to create streetscapes that connect them to 'their past'. There is nothing terribly exotic about this - people who do up their sitting rooms in Victorian style, or who have shopped from a Past Times catalogue, will know the feeling right away.

The second reason is equally about time mongering. It's not just that ritual aesthetics are about seeming old. It's also that inbuilt in our contemporary model of religion is the notion of a golden age when our baroque churches were built and when (united, of course) families got together every evening to recite the Rosary. What followed was decadence, secularism, and social dysfunctionality. And modern architecture. Which is why Richard England on sacred spaces is for many a contradiction in terms. 'My' student had met locals in Manikata who told him that their church was 'empty' - and they meant that spiritually as well as aesthetically.

Gabbana's (of D&G fame) yacht, the Regina d'Italia, is rather the opposite of Maìn. Leopard prints, eelskin (yes, eelskin) shagreen lining the cabins, gold plated door handles - the works.

Come next year, the people at the marina ought to make sure they get the right designer.

mafalzon@hotmail.com