When logic and proportion have fallen

by anna at 06:40 PM on October 25, 2004

We have a traditional coffee table in our living room. When we replaced the sofa and loveseat it seemed a tad low. You have to lean down to put your cup on the coaster. It's a bit of a hassle but not so much so that we'd shell out for a new one. Downstairs it's the opposite problem, in that the tables are too high for the couches. This causes us to spill many glasses of wine. It's all about proportion.

All our table are within the normal range of height. This, on the other hand, is not. It's a fashionable, much sought-after Kang table. It would be suitable in an old-style Japanese restaurant where you sit on pillows on the floor, not in your living room. Why would anyone want a coffee table that is useless? Why, to impress your hoity-toity friends, that's why: Oh look, she's got a table that is only 8 inches high. She doesn't care about functionality or ergonomics. How pretentious is that?

It's the same way with clothes. Most of us have chosen a style that suits us and we stick to it. We're not slaves to fashion. Under no circumstance would we be caught dead in this outlandish getup. Nor would we set foot on the street clad in these duds. Like transparent purses, these fashions will be slow to catch on, particularly in the heartland. Never mind though---next year they'll be back with another ludicrous collection no one will wear.

The fashion world is a world apart. Designers trot out their collections and gaunt-looking apparitions parade about the catwalk done up like rodeo clowns. Celebs congregate and applaud politely. Fashion critics comment as though any ordinary person would ever wear these garish styles and invite the ridicule of their peers.

Once I offered to foot the bill at a fancy Santa Barbara bistro. I ordered squab. The waiter brought a plate with a bird the size of a canary, carrot carvings and two long string beans. You call that dinner?

I love art. In particular I like American impressionists like Hassan and Cornoyer. Others go in for baroque, Romanticism or the Old Masters. But I can't imagine anyone really digs this sort of random stuff. And yet art critics will read all manner of depth and meaning into what is essentially a child's drawing you put on your refrigerator with a magnet (and remove as soon as he isn't looking.) It speak to the eternal loneliness of the human condition! It crackles with sexual tension! It signifies something or other!

Perhaps more inexplicably, ordinary people will fritter away hours peering at this trash with their heads cocked at a quizzical angle. Nobody will dare to say, "Dude, this sucks. My 4 year old could create better art." Even though it's the truth---just as few people really enjoy artsy foreign films with subtitles. We have little use for the lethargic actors, soft-core porn posing as art, nuanced subplots and monotonous dialogue.

The purpose of bizzare furniture, haute couture, fancy cuisine, abstract art and foreign films is to make elitists feel smugly superior to we the great unwashed. But if you ask me the joke's on them. Give me functional furniture, regular chothes, all you can eat buffets, recognizable art and movies in English any day.