Eddie don't like furniture, na na, na na

[venta]

Having had really rather a nice meal with snow_leopard at Bankside on Friday night (modulo the scary deep fried risotto), we branched out randomly into a bit of culture on Saturday.

So, the Wallace Collection, which promised us "one of the best collections of French 18th-century pictures, porcelain and furniture in the world, a remarkable array of 17th-century paintings and a superb armoury".

Yup, they're right about the armoury; it's great - in particular the oriental section is intriguing to someone used only to seeing European arms and armour. However, it did make me feel that, to be honest, the weapons manufacturers of today just aren't trying. I mean, look at your average hand gun. Probably black, plain, serviceable. Where's the chasing, engraving, etching ? Where is the elegant working and moulding on even the most hidden part of the mechanism ?

Mind you, I can't help feeling that if Glock produced next season's automatic with finely enamelled flowers covering the barrel and stock, there'd be some sort of international outcry. Words like sick and inappropriate would be used, in screaming 14-point headlines. And maybe they'd even be right. But in general, it makes me sad that objects bought today don't have that amazing attention to detail, nor the suggestion that the craftsman who made them was determined to make every single part as well as he could.

The paintings were, to be honest, something of a mixed bag. They have a fair number of the gorgeous, almost luminescent interior scenes that the Dutch went in for painting in the late 1600s, and I'd happily look at those all day. They have innumerable still lifes, all with obligatory bleeding game bird. The have a large number of Canaletti (or whatever the plural of Canaletto is), whose clean, clear lines I really like, and they have a pleasingly low number of saints in extravagant stages of matyrdom.

And they have staggering numbers of "society" potraits. At one point, I observed a potrait of (I think) Empress Frederick II, and found myself instantly drawn to it, stuffed though it was into a dark corner above a doorway. A moment's analysis suggested that it was the first "real" face I'd seen. The Empress looked like she had personality, like she'd be interesting to talk to. The indentikit portraits of her contemporaries suggested they were all fluffy-haired, simpering creatures, the fashionable expression of myopic vacuity rendering their features unremarkable and unmemorable.

I have also learnt from these pictures that everyone from servant girls to shepherdesses, grieving widows to biblical heroines, was completely incapable of keeping their dresses on. Decolletage was, it seems, somewhat eXtreme at that time.

And the furniture, ye gods, the furniture. This is early eighteenth century design philosophy - not the latter half of the century when, as Felix pointed out yesterday, anything so much as an unnecessary bend in a piece of furniture was punishable by the guillotine. They liked gilding. A lot. In that they liked a lot of it, a lot.

And then some. Imagine a pleasing wooden bureau, nicely proportioned, and with perhaps a simple marquetry inset. Now add gilded lions heads, acanthus leaves, scrolls and, in extreme cases, cherubs. Now add some more. Keep gilding until the poor thing looks like its slender, turned legs are about to buckle. Now it's done.

Even allowing for changing fashions, I just can't understand how anyone liked the stuff. Possibly, as Snow_Leopard pointed out, the main aim was to show how rich you were, and aesthetics came a pretty poor second. The things that era could do to clocks does not bear thinking about.

Oh, and we found a floralaetifica Minueting about in the Great Gallery, which was very entertaining to watch. I must admit, I'm a bit hazy about the niceties of the minuet, and hadn't imagined it involved quite so much, er, posturing. I blame the French.

However, I like a good rant, so still enjoyed gazing on the gilded horror that was the furniture and porcelain. And I now feel a lot more qualified to have opinions on the eighteenth century. Ten points to the Wallace Collection for free entry and free cloakroom, but lose some of them again for making you pay for a floor plan of the museum. Paying for a guide book is fair enough - but £2 for a map is a bit steep. And their restaurant may be nice, but is a bit on the pricey side (think £12 for a main course, rather than your average museum café). We avoided it and nipped out to a nearby Chinese.

Many thanks, anyway, to Snow_leopard for hospitality, good company and navigational competence.

In other news, does anyone want to confirm or deny that the riff from Franz Ferdinand's Matinée sounds a bit like Hava Nagila, or is that just me ?

Comments

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

the weapons manufacturers of today just aren't trying. I mean, look at your average hand gun. Probably black, plain, serviceable?

Now add gilded lions heads, acanthus leaves, scrolls and, in extreme cases, cherubs. Now add some more. Keep gilding until the poor thing looks like its slender, turned legs are about to buckle. Now it's done.

So what you're basically saying is "everything should have precisely the degree of pointless decorative ornamentation that I happen to like"? ;-)

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[venta.livejournal.com]

Well, yes :)

Well, actually, no. My grumble about the lack of ornamentation today was more that it was perhaps indicative of a lack of intention to detail, and a lack of pride and care over the finished article. And I was amused to note that sometimes the motifs of the decoration were things which society would deem unacceptable for guns. I'll concede that some of the European weaponry was pretty damn hideously over-ornamented, too.

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[venta.livejournal.com]

Obviously, I misspelled "attention to detail" for Humourous Effect.

Ahem.

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[onebyone.livejournal.com]

I think this is quite odd, because in any objective sense a lot more effort goes into designing many modern mass-produced products than ever went into any individual piece of furniture, or gun, or whatever, that was made by a single person. It's all about your Vorsprung Durch Teknik, you know.

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[satyrica.livejournal.com]

I thought it wasn't. Or about those joggers who go round and round and round.

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[venta.livejournal.com]

Effort, possibly, though it tends to be at the design stage rather than the manufacture stage. Although sometimes when I see the results of said design process, I do wonder. See around 50% of the mobile phones on the market for details.

My rambling about the guns was somewhat confused, and contained several strands of thought which got rather mixed together. Perhaps I shouldn't have opinions on Monday mornings. I don't think my argument about craftsmanship really extends very well to mass-produced items, to be honest.

At home I have a wooden stool, made by my great uncle. If you turn it upside down, the underside of the seat is finished as well as the top, and the grains of the woods are as well-matched. It gives me a sense of enormous well-being, and sets a standard which even craftsman-made furniture one can buy today often doesn't live up to.

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[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Effort, possibly, though it tends to be at the design stage rather than the manufacture stage.

Since the whole purpose of mass production is to reduce the effort at the manufacture stage, that makes sense to me.

the underside of the seat is finished as well as the top

Since this kind of detail (unlike too many cherubs) isn't ever harmful, I assume that the reason you don't get it now is that there isn't sufficient demand. And I'm going to guess that the reason that there isn't sufficient demand is that it's too expensive.

My theory is that this "too expensive" comes from somewhat inaccurate judgements. Mass production greatly reduces the number of distinct suppliers of furniture, and all but removes any flow of information from the user to the maker. The result of this is that if the maker sees a 1% reduction in costs by making the product slightly worse, he will often take it without knowing whether the users would on average have preferred to pay the extra 1%. Maybe he uses focus groups to estimate opinion, maybe he doesn't. The reason capitalism doesn't make him suffer for this is that you can't just get another maker to do you "the same as his used to be like, and here's the 1% extra", so there is no direct competition over this 1% marginal change.

Hence we get flat-pack furniture, McDonalds food, and "this product will not necessarily work on all CD players". But even at the better-quality end of things, the fact that people are used to producers cutting corners means that they can generally do so, and the fact that they can means that they will because its the same money either way.

I'd be curious to know how much of the "efficiency" of free market methods comes directly from lowering the expectations of your customers.

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[venta.livejournal.com]

On a moderately related note, I've been wondering if the resurgence recently of various forms of "gourmet" food suppliers has been a reaction to flatpack food. Supermarkets are great, and I'm glad they exist, but I'm also happy to see the growing number of specialised high-quality food shops.

Sadly, in the case of things like furniture, the gourmet bookshelves tend to be sufficiently expensive that they're inaccessible to the vast majority. Certainly, in buying (say) a bookshelf from Argos, I expect a certain amount of low-quality, and a chipboard backing. I've certainly declined to buy more upmarket bookshelves in the past because I expect better than chipboard. Maybe next time that happens I'll write to the manufacturer telling them why.