I’ve been waiting a long time to find an article that helps me understand why Restoration Hardware carries items such as its Wine Barrel Chandelier described as “Handcrafted from French Oak Wine Barrel Staves and Hoops” in its mail order catalogue.
How many old French wine barrels can there be lying around? Who wants to buy this kind of item through the mail?
I finally found the quintessential article on Salon.com today called Overpriced Antiques for Anxious Yuppies. I found it by googling the words “Reclaimed wood restoration hardware bullshit.” Gotta love it when Google works so well. The article does a brilliant job of describing our longing for objects that:
Trumpet their own authenticity and hint at a connection to the earth and an appreciation for craftsmanship and artistry and the untold charms of the world’s foreign peoples
But of course, the reality is these items are not authentic at all. They are just
Our new way of soothing ourselves over our lives of idle acquisition…We pretend to appreciate the strong hands that fashioned this hand-woven wool rug or built that delightful floor lamp. In this age of ephemeral digital connections and vaporous 24-hour media feeds when most of us spend our days squinting at computer screens, it makes sense that we would be infatuated by the notion of real labor, that we would cling to the concreteness of old stuff that looks like it has a long and storied history.
And now there’s a show that allows us to blow-up our fetish for the faux authentic. It’s called Man Shops Globe which follows Keith Johnson, the lucky fellow who is head buyer for Urban Outfitters (which owns Anthropologie) and travels the world in search of authentic objects to knock-off for our shopping pleasure.
It seems we are at the peak postmodernism where the search for ‘authenticity’ is utterly futile. Those exotic night markets in Thailand are ways for us to fetishize our idea of exoticism. And now, we don’t even need to support their “handicrafts” to decorate our homes like we’ve traveled the world.
Call it armchair exoticism. Call it faux authenticity. Bottom line is, it’s just more of the same conspicuous consumption.
