A visit to San Simeon, the Hearst mansion in California:
An incomparable collection of genuine pieces, too, the Castle
of Citizen Kane achieves a psychedelic effect and a kitsch result
not because the Past is not distinguished from the Present
(because after all this was how the great lords of the past
amassed rare objects, and the same continuum of styles can be
found in many Romanesque churches where the nave is now baroque
and perhaps the campanile is eighteenth century), but because
what offends is the voracity of the selection, and what
distresses is the fear of being caught up by this jumble of
venerable beauties, which unquestionably has its own wild flavor,
its own pathetic sadness, barbarian grandeur and sensual
perversity, redolent of contamination, blasphemy, the Black Mass.
It is like making love in a confessional with a prostitute
dressed in a prelate's liturgical robes reciting Baudelaire while
ten electronic organs reproduce the _Well Tempered Clavier_
played by Scriabin.
--- Umberto Eco, _Travels in Hyperreality_
