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.

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...

Popular posts from this blog

Ships (Westport, CT)

I graduated from high school in 1987, and although I had applied to college (one only, I knew what I wanted) and gotten my acceptance, I deferred matriculation for a year. It was for the best. Teen angst and anger were peaking, I was sick of school, and really it would've been a waste for me to go straight through when all I could think of was living on my own in the "real" world. Well, I got a dose of that. A good dose of what I could expect to do with a high school diploma and—let it be said—a bunch of shifty slackers for roommates, whose only ambition was to get wasted and stay that way all day. Except that I was not a slacker; that's something I never have been. And even if I had wanted to party—illegally, mind you, I was still underage for beer let alone the rest of what was out there to be had—well, there wasn't the time or energy for it. After a somewhat lost summer following graduation, I set about getting a job, a checking account, and an apartment, tryin

Touch Club

Another experience to come out of my father's L.A. years with Playboy was involvement with a private, membership-based Beverly Hills supper club called Touch. The connections are fuzzy in my mind. I always want to say that the club was backed financially by Playboy Enterprises, but I'm not sure this is accurate. It may have just been that one of the club's owners belonged to Hefner's entourage—being one of the many who made it their business to stop by the Playboy mansion on a regular basis. Or perhaps he (I forget his name, despite having heard it regularly at one point in my life) was a salaried employee of the company, linked somehow to club/casino operations? However it came into being, the Touch Club opened in the early 1980s (perhaps it was the year 1980; it was eventually sold in 1986), and we dined there sometimes, my parents and I; this was always a special occasion I got to dress up for. I don't remember the menu, but based on the intended clientele, I'

Polly's Pies

Today I made a fresh strawberry pie. Maybe it's the wishful thinking of a transitional season: it's spring officially, but you don't quite feel it yet, at least not in New York. Making a fruit pie can't force sunny spring weather to come any quicker, but it still tastes good, and the color of the pie, glazed with a fruit/sugar/cornstarch reduction, is a cheerful anecdote for the often rainy and gray sky in early April. I used to have my paternal grandmother's recipe, but looking for it this afternoon, I couldn't find it. I ended up substituting a recipe from another trusted Southerner, Lee Bailey, whose Southern Desserts cookbook has been on my shelf from the time I first had my own kitchen. The pie came out great—actually, it was better than my grandmother's version (or my misfired attempts at her version, should I be the one at fault). But all this thinking about, making, now writing about pie has brought up another landmark of memory: Polly's Pies in