Redecorating (part one)
The unmitigated horror of repainting is this: it means redecorating. Now, for the decorating kind of mind, “decorating” is never really “finished.” The current state is always an impermanent and imperfect reflection of some unspoken, fully satisfying level of decoration that will never be reached.I am not a decorator. When I met Gloria in 1995, I had a calendar on the wall in my apartment. From 1985.
I have television. I look at that. I don’t look at the walls. The walls are what the ceiling connects to. Sort of. Okay, I’m not a builder, either.
Gloria wants “new art” on the walls because they’ve been repainted. She knows me, somewhat, after a decade, so instead of asking me what I wanted (to which I would have replied, in all seriousness, “Um—nothing?”), she selected a group of prints at a store for me to review.
She spent, I don’t now, hours picking out these prints. Woman have an evaluation machine that must resemble the fantastic innerworkings of an M.C. Escher sketch. My evaluation machine is a flip book that creates an animation of a man falling off a bicycle.
Hey, don’t get on my case. It’s a highbrow flip book—the bicycle has one of those gigantic front wheels, like in the nineteen century.
So Gloria looks at one of these prints and motors start to hum. Workers feed in raw materials. Steam begins to rise. Hundreds of thousands of parts begin to move in perfect synchronization. Evaluating a single print can take five minutes or more.
And this is what happens when she brings me a stack of ten to consider: “No, no, maybe, no, maybe, no, no, absolutely not.”
“Absolutely not?” she asks.
“It’s a woman lying naked on the couch. No art boobies in the bedroom.”
“What do you mean? That’s a Matisse,” she said.
“The first rule of art boobies is that the painter of the boobies does not matter. The reason it doesn’t matter is that the quality of renderings by the Boobage School rarely varies. There are only so many ways to paint a boobie.”
“I can’t believe you’re so hung up about breasts,” she said.
“I’m not hung up. I just don’t want to look at a pair of anonymous art boobies twenty times a day for the next ten years. That’s too much boobage, even for a connoisseur.”
“I’m sure you fancy yourself a connoisseur,” she said.
Kandinsky managed to resolve the dispute without bloodshed.
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