Complex Numbers

Psych!

Yesterday was Lower Decks day, so I drank the last of my Romulan Ale (for now) and two Lower Drunks. I'm still feeling it. But I'm still going to blog.

More Is More: The End of Minimalism  

Oh, thank the gods. Wait...

Marie Kondo's decluttering dominance is over. Make way for maximalism, where the more stuff, the merrier

So, from one extreme to another? How... American.

Article is from last October, but whatever.

Last January, shortly before the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, Sotheby’s in New York put together what was supposed to be a modest auction of a dead interior decorator’s things... when he died, in 2018, he left no will, only five storage units and two homes stacked to the ceilings with the types of finds one might imagine belonged to a man who slept on a Chinese four-poster bed crowned by an Ottoman-style dome near columns carved to look like windswept palm trees.

I don't know about you, but I'm going to have that visual stuck in my head all night.

Still... so what?

Still, everyone at the auction seemed to feel the same thing: like a lid had been lifted, revealing years of pent-up desire for the full, the festive, the flagrantly jouissant. “Clearly, there’s a lot of people fed up with monochromatic interiors,” Sotheby’s Dennis Harrington told the Times, “and newly excited by Mario’s maximalist style.”

It's like I've said: just wait. The pendulum will swing back.

I just wish it would spend more time in the middle.

Style is a pendulum, and it likes drama in its swing.

Fuck, I should probably read these things before commenting on them.

...nah.

Over the past year, a new home-related polarization has also erupted online, with several publications pitting the decor styles against each other: “Minimalism Is Dead. Meet Maximalism,” crowed one Vox headline while Harper’s Bazaar asked, “Minimalism vs Maximalism: Which Is More Stylish?”

Look. It seems obvious to me. And probably to anyone with an ounce of awareness. Minimalism simply didn't sell anything; it was about getting rid of stuff, cleansing, buying very little. Its polar opposite? Why, maximalism is like candy for companies. Consumerism run rampant. BUY MORE STUFF.

No wonder they're all trying to shove this "new trend" down our collective throats.

For a few years now, the rooms featured on popular decor sites and the homes of style influencers like Aurora James or Cara Delevingne have been wilfully diverse, drunk on self-expression, and packed with stuff—places where messy bedrooms are displayed as a sign of life rather than a problem to be fixed.

I consider it a point of pride that I have no idea who the hell those people are.

In a consumer culture, minimalism was always a somewhat fancyland ruse. It was domestic anorexia sold as health; materialism repackaged as its opposite; perfectionism hawked as peace. It was the perversion of labelling a home curated down to zero the ultimate luxury or, worse, virtue.

Of course, minimalism has its own problems: if you don't have stuff, what the hell are you going to do?

So I see where this is coming from now. First, sell the public on minimalism: get rid of, as the article notes, "perfectly good stuff." Pare your home down to the bones. Throw everything away; it's all millstones around your neck. Next? Well, we were just kidding. You actually need stuff. Buy it on our website!

This is the usual fashion cycle, writ large. Convince people that the old way was Wrong, and if you buy our stuff, you'll be Right!

I have an idea.

I call it an "idea" but it's how I've lived most of my life.

Buy what you need. Sometimes, buy what you want. Keep it until entropy takes it. Only throw shit away if it's truly useless. You never know when you'll need something.

My ex liked to purge all my stuff. When she left, I had to buy more stuff. I still harbor resentment over that. I miss my old dining table. It was a perfectly good table.

This isn't minimalism. It isn't maximalism. It's... I'd call it utilitarianism, but unfortunately, Ayn Rand destroyed that word for all time.