i have not scoffed at pottery barn's catalogues for awhile, and in case anyone forgets why i ever started, pottery barn has made it easy, in their recent editions, to remember.
pottery barn's catalogue, more than others of its ilk, nauseates me in its campaign to memorialize "memories" -- family memories -- with its products. yet, at the same time, it attempts to make family memories and personal experiences look as much like mass-media reportage as possible. pottery barn suggests that we must send a message to all our peers/rivals that insists that WE ARE HAPPY, and the way to do this is with very slick, modified versions of what might, in classier circumstances, be meaningful and private, cherished remembrances.
to paraphrase bruce jay friedman, we are far from the city of class.
on an unrelated friedman note (unrelated to the unreproachable bruce jay, but relatively related to a pottery barn mindset), did anyone see the film capturing the friedmans? i was fascinated by it, to the point of watching it twice in a 24 hour period. david friedman touched me deeply and i found it extraordinary that he realized that his family's obsession with taking photos and home movies -- DOCUMENTING their "good family" -- was not only part of their undoing, but also, a way to forget how things actually were. if they could remember the movies and the photos, they were able to forget what had happened to and around them.
pottery barn has always been here to remind you that it's a good idea.
from merriam-webster:
Main Entry: art·ful
Pronunciation: 'ärt-f&l
Function: adjective
1 : performed with or showing art or skill
2 a : using or characterized by art and skill : DEXTEROUS
3 : ARTIFICIAL
synonym see SLY
just for the hell of it, since i used the word "cherish", let's do that one to see the differences.
Main Entry: cher·ish
Pronunciation: 'cher-ish
Function: transitive verb
Etymology: Middle English cherisshen, from Middle French cheriss-, stem of cherir to cherish, from Old French, from chier dear, from Latin carus -- more at CHARITY
1 a : to hold dear : feel or show affection for b : to keep or cultivate with care and affection : NURTURE
2 : to entertain or harbor in the mind deeply and resolutely
synonym see APPRECIATE
no new point to make here; it's just a refresher.
pottery barn has more than one way to suggest a household arm itself against the possibility of oneupmanship, and being kept up with by the joneses. it's not just family photos shoved in their faces when they come over to borrow a cup of rice milk. you have to ENTERTAIN people in your home -- and do it well -- to show them how very accomplished you are. sometimes you even have to allow these people -- if they are out-of-towners -- to sleep over! and to prove your value and prowess, the best thing to do is make the experience seem as little like an actual private home as possible. the suggestion here is: i am such an amazing host/hostess, that people would actually think about PAYING to stay here if i asked them to!
this should do the trick. a sign that says HOTEL that you put in one of the bedrooms of your home. this is an item for sale in the pottery barn catalog.
let us not forget that we can use pottery barn not only to sell us the things we need, but to tell us the things we need to know. they are on the cutting edge of information such as... flower arrangement.
tropical flowers, we find, come from humid and warm -- "tropical" -- parts of the world. they have the properties of both color and shape. thank god pottery barn has written an entire book about flowers. tropical flowers, with their colors and their shapes, can lend surprise to an arrangement.
you know what adds "surprise" to a flower arrangement? spring-loaded action.
i guess a lot of handknitters and fiber workers have issues with quantity versus quality. i have been disheartened myself over tales of mass-produced pre-aged houses that would look all loveworn and lived-in and one-of-a-kind and special, and with the bile-producing wittman samplers, which, while not sold through pottery barn, are affected with the same deficiencies as many pottery barn displays.
what then do we say to this?
i have to admit, this isn't the most heinous example in the world. it's actually kind of funny. i like the idea of soccer moms out scrounging brown and green glass bottles in landfills because they read in pottery barn that large numbers of ANYTHING stacked against a wall become "artwork". i mean, who wants art in the hands of clueless private collectors when you can just let disney own it, and go see it there?
pottery barn shoppers really don't know what to do with art, anyway...
... i LOVE this picture. i love the idea that they did this on PURPOSE, out of spite. "nobody is going to come into MY HOUSE and leaf through a book about JULIAN FUCKING SCHNABEL -- not that easily!"
the art books stacked in a way that it's impossible to get to them, all to hold up a vase, is the funny part of the picture. the less funny part of the picture, not shown so much here, is the collection of black and white photos of infants on the shelf there. in the full photo, they are not just photos of infants, but infants being held by seminaked men -- which is always supposed to mean something fantastic and deep and slightly sexy. men who love their babies. or some crap. but all the photos here are of DIFFERENT infants. it's not one infant growing up little by little. it's not multiple infants from different eras. it's a large collection of various, random, infants.
i'm not ready to go into how pottery barn objectifies babies and children, but it is disgusting, and as i said to ben this weekend, becoming parents is going to open doorways for us, doorways through which we will meet people whom we will probably revile more than any we have met to date. but, that's for a little bit later...
forgive me for being freaked out. i realize that pottery barn markets mostly towards young homesteaders -- newly marrieds, new parents, people reaping the earnings of those first big jobs. people anxious to "make their mark", of course, often make it a big louder and messier than those confident with who they are. they doth protest too much, assert too much, buy too much. you need only stand a step or two outside their group to see how strange it looks.
but i think the marketing looks beyond those people also, to the empty nesters who also are supposed to be happy, relaxed, EXCITED to have the house to themselves so they can now ENTERTAIN their FRIENDS (and the framed family photos that those friends will be faced with at every turn just go with the territory).
anywhere you look, the desperation is right under the surface.
if we, just for today, define "culture" as "the debris of our enlightenment" -- what is going to happen to us if our forms of expression turn away from trying to make sense of our pain and struggle, and in effect, sharing that pain and struggle with the world -- and turn towards the obfuscation of everything about our lives that is not perfect and advertiseable? what if things keep going the pottery barn, life-and-family-as-commodity way? the thought of miles davis sitting around arranging photos of his children so that his friends will see them when they come over for tea, and so that they will hopefully think to themselves "wow, miles sure does have a GREAT family," ... that scares the piss out of me. (and not just because he's a dessicated skeleton now and can't be trusted with a teapot.)
in twenty years, is there going to be anything hanging in the museums, or will the artists be too busy being "artful" at home? is there going to be any music to listen to other than the dinnertime, retro-mix cd's you can buy, currently, at pottery barn?
is it october yet?