Kanye West tells Annie Leibovitz: check out my wedding snap

Once again, the business of being Kanye West drives its sole practitioner to the point of exhaustion.

If you were one of those people who assumed that Kanye and Kim Kardashian were able to relax on the honeymoon that followed their recent wedding in Florence, then prepare for disappointment. It turns out that Kim was 'exhausted' during what should have been a romantic break, as the couple 'spent four days' working on the wedding photo they later Instagrammed, 'because the flowers were off-colour and stuff like that.'

Can you bear it? Why can't life throw these two kids a bone just once?

It's all the fault of celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz, apparently, who withdrew her participation from the Kimye nuptials at the eleventh hour. Not that Kanye was going to let his vision be compromised by her absence. 'Because Annie pulled out,' he told a panel discussion audience this week, 'I was like: 'I still want my wedding photos to look like Annie Leibovitz's photos.''

Mmm. LiS hates to rain on Kanye's parade, but if they were actual Annie Leibovitz photos, the backdrop would have been a dark and brooding sky, the couple would have been literally knee-deep in a lavish but decomposing wedding feast, and there wouldn't have been a wind machine left to hire in southern Europe. Still, Kanye regards himself as entirely vindicated, as the snap became the most-liked image ever uploaded to Instagram.

As for what drives the hip-hop star's perfectionism, it's never entirely clear. There's such a fine line between genius and a comical sort of delirium - I know, because I saw it on Amadeus - and there are times when Kanye appears just a continent or two the wrong side of it.

He inquires rhetorically: 'Can you imagine telling someone who wants to just Instagram a photo, who's the No 1 person on Instagram, 'We need to work on the colour of the flower wall,' or the idea that it's a Givenchy dress, and it's not about the name Givenchy, it's about the talent that is Riccardo Tisci - and how important Kim is to the internet.'

I can't imagine any of that, no. In fact, I have read it three times now, and I can't even understand half of it. Still, I like the implication that the internet wouldn't really happen without Kim.

'And the fact the No 1 most-liked photo [on Instagram] has a kind of aesthetic,' continues Kanye, 'was a win for what the mission is, which is raising the palate.'

To the many, many missions of Kimye, then, we must add Raising The Palate Of Instagram - whatever it may mean. And we must obviously surrender entirely to Kanye's theory on why Leibovitz pulled out. 'I think,' he declares, 'she was scared of the idea of celebrity.' I'm sure that must be it. Not since Andy Warhol has a creative been quite as petrified of fame as poor Annie, and palate raisers everywhere must be relieved that early 21st-century Earth's most exceptional polymath was on hand to step into the breach.