Luxury or Trash?
Salon’s Heather Havrilesky offers a serious analysis of the tragicomic phenomenon of “authentic” household items.
. . . Sundance’s “Man Shops Globe” (premieres 10 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 7) is at once so fascinating and so repugnant. Of course, I would never blame Keith Johnson for this. His job traveling the globe to buy enormous overpriced pieces of weird, ancient junk so that Anthropologie can put that junk in its stores and sell it for truly ludicrous, mind-blowing prices is obviously the sort of job that anyone who wishes they had enough time and energy to rummage endlessly through flea markets would love. He’s a creative professional, one who’s exceptionally good at spotting exactly the sorts of rusty old bullshit that anxious, existentially wobbly, overworked yuppies find hopelessly, thrillingly, reassuringly authentic. . .
[O]n their way through the South African countryside, Johnson and McGowan unexpectedly stumble on a furniture maker creating benches out of tree limbs and odd bits of lumber. “He was a guy who clearly loved what he was doing, and that came out in his things,” says Johnson. And so we return to the unspoken goal of these treasure hunts: to ease the anxious yuppie back home. If you hate what you do for a living, at least you make enough money to own stuff that was created by someone who loves what they do.
But let’s not blame him for this expensive pursuit of soul and history. No, let’s blame the slippery, hectic, disposable, mass-produced culture we live in, first and foremost, the culture that makes us ache for things that mean something, that might be genuine enough to ground us between tweets. Let’s blame the hideous stucco huts and vinyl-sided monstrosities whose ugliness added insult to the injury of our impending bankruptcies. Let’s blame the overpriced but still cheap-looking crap we bought at Target before we lost our jobs, cheap stuff that made us sick to cast our eyes upon it, when compared to the divine, sacred things we saw in those damnable catalogs on the floors of our bathrooms. . .
Because if the world weren’t so filled with tacky, impermanent things, then we wouldn’t thirst so terribly for big, heavy, meaningful furniture flown in from Paris. If the world weren’t littered with Styrofoam cups and vertical blinds and stained wall-to-wall carpeting and other tacky junk, then we wouldn’t be so hungry for that meticulously branded, fully sanctioned and approved, carefully designed, obscenely expensive imported French junk. . .
[T]he most telling moment of “Man Shops Globe” comes when Johnson is presented with a grandiose, colorful, tangled plastic chandelier, the sort of “Emperor’s New Clothes” objet d’art that walks the line between trash and treasure, between exquisite and hideous. What will Johnson think of this one? We wonder as he gazes almost confusedly at the monstrosity.
Finally, he pronounces it divine. “It was the high-low thing, which is always so interesting,” Johnson explains. “You have this very grand chandelier shape, and then, on close inspection, you see that it’s made of Barbie legs and plastic milk bottle tops.” And so, another bit of arts and crafts is christened and made relevant by Johnson’s Midas touch. Indeed, at the end of the second episode a quick note on-screen tells us that the even-larger chandelier Johnson commissioned from the same artists “was purchased by President Obama. It now hangs in the children’s room in the White House.”