Skip to main content

Chaqu'un son gout


Can you ever really talk candidly about a difference in aesthetic taste, if the difference is between you and your spouse? More precisely, if the difference lies between you, your spouse, and an "object d'art" that you would rather see at the bottom of the ocean than anywhere in your living space? How do you debate taste without sounding like a snob or a dictator, a person with no tolerance for difference at all? Can you really ever convince someone that the item they liked enough to purchase with their own hard-earned money is totally hideous and inappropriate? It's just your opinion, after all. It's your taste against theirs, so who's to say who's "right" (even if you are the one with exposure to fine art, art history, and so forth)? I will admit up front that yes, of course, we should all be able to like what we like without being criticized for our preferences. To each his (or her) own; or, as the French say, "Chaqu'un son gout." However, should we really have to live with the consequences of aesthetic diplomacy in our own bedrooms? Let me be blunt. I am talking about the worst pair of lamps I've ever laid eyes on. I remember them all too well. Naked-girl lamps with globes for shades, one globe supported by the foot of a girl reclining on her back, the other held aloft in some complex pose reminiscent of a figure skater's Biellmann spin. The lamps were some kind of cheap plaster, painted black to look like . . . like I don't know what. The closest I can come to explaining the style would be to ask you to think of an Art Nouveau/belle époque cabaret, then cheapen it. The lamps must have appealed to some streak of national identity in my husband; he seemed to boast of them, like some badge of honor regarding French attitudes about human anatomy (i.e., contrast with "puritanical" Americans, who, my husband likes to remind me, censored Balthus's drawing of a nude girl on a bottle of 1993 Mouton Rothschild). I am not saying that the lamps were pornographic, merely that I found them in bad taste. Again, it's true that there's a place for everything, but the place for these lamps was definitely some kind of bachelor pad or bordello, not in our newly established shared home. Is it really just me, just a repressed kind of taste—or is there something not quite right about blackened images of girls (not women, but definitely underage girls who looked about fourteen) who are turned into functional objects to be used and worse, to be "turned on" at will? Really, I hated the lamps, and there will be people who think that I'm uptight for this, although I can honestly say they didn't threaten me. I wasn't jealous; it wasn't like that. Judge me as you will, as I in turn judge my husband's lamps. Former lamps, actually. For although I don't think I ever really won the battle over what constitutes good taste, I did win the war over whether the lamps would ultimately stay or go. The first lamp was broken accidentally. By me, yes, but I have a witness: it was a genuine accident caused in the midst of a move. The second lamp was stashed in a closet in the new apartment. We had moved because our son, then turning one, had become impossible to contain and was pushing us out of our one-bedroom space. Our son was another reason why I put my foot down about the remaining lamp. Was that really something we needed in our home as we raised a young boy and tried to teach him about respecting girls? That second lamp came out of the closet one day, a couple years later, while my son was in preschool. I put it back in the closet before picking him up, then called my husband to warn him that I moved it and we could talk about it later. We did talk about it. He didn't get my point of view at all. Which brings me back to the original question: how do you have a productive discussion about taste? If you leave it on that level, you get nowhere. Just "You have your taste, I have mine." The points about social messages? Lost, I'm afraid. But when it came time to move again, I have to say that either there was a change of heart (or opinion or taste), or else it was a good-will gesture that I will always cherish: the second and last of the lamps went out to a school fundraising tag sale. God knows who might have picked it up. I'm betting no one, but then again, there's no accounting for personal taste.
Labels:

Comments

watersidemom said…
It's uncanny, but after reading the second sentence, a certain lamp came to mind immediately! Men have terrible taste in lamps, it seems. As a mom of girls, I appreciate your conscientious efforts to raise your son to be respectful of women; I don't think that enough of us (girls' moms, included)make that effort, frankly. Congratulations on getting rid of your lamp! Ours is still with us, but no longer out...
April 8, 2009 at 2:18 PM

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tap Root Manuscript

Here is an early music memory: I am very young. If not still a toddler, then not much older. I am running around the living room, squealing with unrestrained delight, while my dad chases me to the tune of "I Am the Lion" by Neil Diamond (Ba-pa-la ding-ga!). He's reached deep down and pulled out his big baritone voice—the one he also used for "Old Man River" on occasion; the one that always awed me. It's the early 1970s, and although hopelessly pop and showy, there is no shame in liking Neil Diamond. Not at this time. Later, I'd go through nearly two decades of keeping this (admittedly) often schmaltzy artist at more than arm's length. When I bothered to remember Neil Diamond, which generally I didn't, I thought of him more like a skeleton in my musical closet; a dirty little secret that, if exposed, would set me up for some heavy razzing from friends. I don't remember when it was that I recovered my dad's Tap Root Manuscript album. It wa...
7 comments
Read more

Black Kids Read, Too

The worst kind of prejudice is the kind that slips under the radar. It's too subtle to cause a stir (and if you point it out, you'll usually get a sideways look: you're the one making too much of nothing), but its corrosive message nevertheless seeps in—subliminally, insidiously—beating down the spirit of the group it belittles or excludes. I am blessed to have been raised by two parents who were sensitive to prejudicial undercurrents; they fought against them in their own distinct ways through the tumultuous 1960s, and into the 70s and 80s as I was growing up. And it seems, thinking about it now, that they never missed a good learning moment with me: we often discussed issues of bias, prejudice, stereotype, and their harmful effects. This week, images in some of my kindergartener's reading books gave me pause. And in wrestling with how to handle these, I remembered something I hadn't thought of in many years: the library at the Brentwood Science Magnet School in ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Touch Typing

Between seventh and eighth grades (or between eighth and ninth?) the deal was this: if I wanted to take an art class in summer school, I had to take typing. So said Mom. Although I didn't mind being in an art studio soldering bits of stained glass together, the thought of staying inside, seated in front of a typewriter when I could see the sun in its beautiful blue sky out the window, was torture. Still, I sat there. Such is the suffering one will endure for art! I typed the home keys in order, hundreds of times: a-s-d-f-g-h-j-k-l-;. I stretched my fingers up for T and Y and down for B. I did pages of the prototype sentence, "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs." Yes, it has every letter of the alphabet in it at least once. I learned to automatically put two spaces after each period. (I have had a hard time undoing this habit, but a copy editor's job these days is often to make sure there is only one space following a complete sentence!) It's fair to say...
3 comments
Read more