Artwork is Subjective!

     My mother always told me that ones taste in art was subjective, and she was right. I am not a huge art collector, although I would be if I had the money. Who wouldn’t love an original Picasso? But because I can’t afford real artwork, and the majority of the furnishings in my home are collectible Mid Century Modern pieces, I hunt for moderately priced Carlo of Hollywood, Ran Su and other rare finds from the Eames era.

   

     Unfortunately for me, I married the Neanderthal of the world of art and design. Until we tied the knot, my husband pretended to like my style. I should have known our tastes would clash when I saw the bad print of the Mona Lisa mounted in a plastic frame on his parent’s living room wall. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. (Wink, wink.)

     

     I’m not a complete snob.  Having cheap artwork hang on the wall of ones own home does not make one a bad person, but if one wants to hang the cheap shit on my wall, it does.

    

     The big problem here is that every time my husband returns from a trip Bulgaria, he brings home some fake gold framed piece of junk he tries to pass off as artwork. And then he insists we have to hang it on our walls somewhere. I gave him two rooms plus the garage where he can have all the bad taste he wants to, but that is not good enough. Now, he wants to hang the latest junk in the rooms that other people see.

   

     I know that there are wonderful artists in Bulgaria who paint pictures that would match the colors and the themes of our rooms. It’s just that my husband never seems to find them. He would rather spend his nickels buying cheap oil paintings or mass-produced prints of famous Roman Ruins sold in the tourist shops of every city.

    

     The latest piece of trash he brought home and called art was a painting by a famous artist stamped on a two-dollar post card. He mounted it in a plastic frame from Staples and placed it on my dining room buffet for all to see. When I asked him why he thought a cheap framed postcard was worthy of a place in our dining room, he said, “It may be two dollars in Bulgaria, but in the US it is worth a fortune. Americans will be impressed by this picture.”

      

     Let me see, I am not sure of the daily exchange rates today, but the last time I checked, 1.5 Bulgarian Lev equaled one dollar, so that makes his piece of artwork worth whole three dollars including the frame he bought at Staples. You get the gist.

   

    Somebody hand me a big gun! I want to blow the brains out of that postcard. 

  

    My daughter warned me that because I choose to stay with my husband it is just something I will have to put up with. And I will--over my dead body--which may be the case since my husband out weights me by sixty pounds. But I've been thinking. What if we had a mini earthquake right beneath our house that no one else feels and all his crappy art work accidentally falls of the wall and breaks? Whose fault would it be?