Making Home with Contemporary Art
Ever felt like the world was changing? You know – that the way things are done these days is more than a little different from the things we were all used to? The simple fact of the matter is this: the UK has just completed what can only be described as a sea change in its living and working habits. The enforced sameness of the late 90s and early Noughties has finally been banished (thanks to a combination of the Internet and the uncertain financial circumstances of recent years) – replaced, finally and fantastically, by an emphasis on originality. You don’t see so many duplicate prints on people’s walls any more: what we have instead is genuine contemporary art, marking the spaces people have chosen to call “home”.
A little depth is required to understand this, one supposes. 10 years ago, everyone was swapping houses with the frequency and fervour of bedroom occupants in a Regency farce. And that meant, more or less, that everyone ended up with the same sorts of fittings and the same kinds of art on the walls. Why? Because, in order to sell a house, one had to ensure it was kitted out with middle of the road stuff so as not to put off any potential buyers. It’s a long established rule of house selling that no-one will buy a place they can’t see themselves living in: and that, in turn, means that you can’t sell a house unless it is decorated in a fashion that doesn’t offend anyone. No contemporary art, just identikit posters, prints and photographic canvases. The kind of stuff, in fact, that one tends to find in any mid level hotel room – or see on the set of any successful sit com.
Now, no-one sells their house. And that, for all the heartache it brought initially, may well be proving to be a very good thing: as the British public rediscovers the idea of “home”. Real homes, where personal tastes are given free reign of expression and people finally get to explore themselves a little, as well as their immediate surroundings. The identikit look is out: in its place, we find a flowering of self expression that probably hasn’t been seen for years. The Internet, in making real contemporary art – affordable art, too – available to the masses, has paved the way for folk to decorate their homes in a way that really sets them up as “homes”: not “houses”; not “dwellings”; but places where real people actually live.
That’s got to be a pretty good thing. In an age where everything seems slowly fated to merge towards an indistinguishable sameness, a bit of individuality goes a heck of a long way. Houses dotted with the same posters and prints of the same images are fading, replaced by homes accentuated with highly individual pieces of contemporary art. Who knows – in a few years time we might all be living somewhere that really expresses who we are. And there’s no telling what psychological and social benefits that might confer – except, for certain, that they’ll be significant.
About the Author
No contemporary art, just identikit posters, prints and photographic canvases. The kind of stuff, in fact, that one tends to find in any mid level hotel room – or see on the set of any successful sit com.
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