Brin (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
brin_bellway) wrote2020-07-26 11:03 am
brin_bellway) wrote2020-07-26 11:03 am
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Looking around at my bedroom today and contemplating how much it confuses me when people say stuff like "you can tell a lot about a person from how their home is decorated".
Like, are people *normally* the primary ones responsible for decorating their own spaces? Most of my home decorations--even in my own bedroom--are things people gifted to me, and I figured "well, now that I've got it, guess I might as well use it". Or things I used only because I suspected (or was outright told by others) that the gifters were the sort of people who react badly when you can't say with a straight face that you're actually using the thing they dumped on you. Or things I got off Craigslist or hand-me-downs because they were functional, and non-ugly enough not to be worth spending more money on something prettier.
...I mean, I guess what this tells you about me is "cares about function, doesn't really care about aesthetics, too cowardly to piss people off by refusing their useless gifts". But can an observer *distinguish* this from "the kind of person who would decorate their home this way entirely of their own free will", whoever that might be? Is my home the equivalent of a guy throwing on random clothes to see what Sherlock Holmes will make of him?
---
There was an occasion--it must have been two years ago now, maybe more--when I seriously considered buying a home decoration purely for aesthetics for once...and then I saw the price tag, and he wanted like a hundred fucking dollars for a piece of wood with some paint on it. Yeah, maybe he carefully hand-painted that design for some fucking reason, maybe it was a fair assessment of the amount of labour involved, but if so he was wasting his time because that is *not* a market-clearing price.
It's *not* a market-clearing price, right? Are there really a significant number of people who would pay a hundred bucks for a painting of an American flag fading into a Canadian flag? I feel like I would *maybe* pay ten. Twenty is really pushing it. (And if it costs more than that to make, then it's not worth making.)
...it kind of scares me what it implies if that *was* a market-clearing price (or even anywhere near one), and I was merely one of the buyers left out when the market clears. If there really are significant numbers of people who value art/beauty/aesthetics/whatever so highly that they think it's actually *worth* the amount of labour you'd need to hire to get someone to carefully hand-paint something. What *else* might be going on inside those alien minds, that I cannot predict?
They say you can tell a lot about a person from how their home is decorated.
Like, are people *normally* the primary ones responsible for decorating their own spaces? Most of my home decorations--even in my own bedroom--are things people gifted to me, and I figured "well, now that I've got it, guess I might as well use it". Or things I used only because I suspected (or was outright told by others) that the gifters were the sort of people who react badly when you can't say with a straight face that you're actually using the thing they dumped on you. Or things I got off Craigslist or hand-me-downs because they were functional, and non-ugly enough not to be worth spending more money on something prettier.
...I mean, I guess what this tells you about me is "cares about function, doesn't really care about aesthetics, too cowardly to piss people off by refusing their useless gifts". But can an observer *distinguish* this from "the kind of person who would decorate their home this way entirely of their own free will", whoever that might be? Is my home the equivalent of a guy throwing on random clothes to see what Sherlock Holmes will make of him?
---
There was an occasion--it must have been two years ago now, maybe more--when I seriously considered buying a home decoration purely for aesthetics for once...and then I saw the price tag, and he wanted like a hundred fucking dollars for a piece of wood with some paint on it. Yeah, maybe he carefully hand-painted that design for some fucking reason, maybe it was a fair assessment of the amount of labour involved, but if so he was wasting his time because that is *not* a market-clearing price.
It's *not* a market-clearing price, right? Are there really a significant number of people who would pay a hundred bucks for a painting of an American flag fading into a Canadian flag? I feel like I would *maybe* pay ten. Twenty is really pushing it. (And if it costs more than that to make, then it's not worth making.)
...it kind of scares me what it implies if that *was* a market-clearing price (or even anywhere near one), and I was merely one of the buyers left out when the market clears. If there really are significant numbers of people who value art/beauty/aesthetics/whatever so highly that they think it's actually *worth* the amount of labour you'd need to hire to get someone to carefully hand-paint something. What *else* might be going on inside those alien minds, that I cannot predict?
They say you can tell a lot about a person from how their home is decorated.
no subject
First: the value of a well-chosen piece of art or other decoration is large, because art can be looked at repeatedly, over and over. And, unlike similarly re-consumable media like books or (safely backed-up) movies or the like, it doesn't require active effort or brainpower to enjoy; sometimes, when I'm lying in bed procrastinating getting up in the morning, or when I'm sitting at my computer trying to figure out what to do next, or when I'm walking into or out of my room, I'll look at one or another of the art pieces on my room's walls and my mood will be momentarily improved. Even if the effect isn't large per instance, the sum of all those small effects adds up a lot over the years.
Second: the gap between a typical piece of art and one particularly to my taste, in terms of expected utility, is large. Most art, even if it's interesting in the short term, doesn't have the previously-discussed effect of momentary mood-improvement once its novelty has worn off, and thus the long-term compounding effect ensures that the latter is worth a lot more investment than the former.
Third: even once short-term novelty wears off, variety remains valuable to me. The majority of the art pieces in my room are framed prints; but I also have a shadowbox, and I used to have a wallscroll, and the ways in which those differ from the other pieces help increase their value relative to More Of The Same. Thus, there's an incentive for me to have good art pieces in a range of different formats, rather than just in the format whose members tend to be cheapest.
Fourth: art space is limited. This is an important one. There's only so much room in the house for me to put art in. There's far less room than that for me to put art in without it feeling cluttered and losing a large chunk of its impact. Thus, even if in some theoretical sense I could be more price-efficient by buying five $10 pretty-good pieces instead of one $50 very-good piece, in practice, the latter is far more likely to yield its full value to me than the former, while the former is more likely to end up displaced by other things. (See, by analogy, the various reasons to prefer carrying one shark over carrying ten shrimp in Runescape, despite the latter being cheaper and healing more.)
Probably there's more. I don't feel like this is a full accounting of my psychology, here. But hopefully, even in its incomplete state, this will be helpful.
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