How normie minimalism and farmhouse chic took over contemporary design
I feel like this article began with a promising idea with a disappointing follow through.<p>&gt; Their commonality lies in the same impulse for vacuous, petit bourgeois taste to launder itself in narratives of nostalgia and cultural legitimacy. When thinking of minimalism, one can only wonder what the once-avant-garde cadre of artists and musicians would think about this hyper-commodified end product of their ethos, practice, and even their living circumstances.<p>You can&#x27;t just say the equivalent of &quot;man I can&#x27;t believe the suburban normies found out about farmhouse lofts -- look at what they took from us&quot; and have that be an actual article. That&#x27;s a concept barely fit for a bored teen tweeting during an art history class (no offense to them either, they would obviously be a lot more self aware than this), much less a longwinded magazine article.<p>Frankly, those frontier domesticating artists who pioneered the cultural idea of a loft are far closer to true upper caste brahmins than the lumpenproletariat vaishyas (which are conflated with the petit bourgeois in a very subtle yet choppy interpolation) that necessarily only later on adopt a diluted version. And of course, it is those brahmin who reap the benefits of clout as their risky phenomenological investment is able to mature to a culturally valuable product and legacy that consumers cannot proclaim founding ownership over. One can only wonder what they would have thought -- to be honest, I can only imagine that they would be very happy and relieved to get a chance to cash out, because being an artist is an extremely competitive and generally financially unstable and unpleasant existence that is only truly available as a vocation to the upper castes. And ironically, I get the sense that it is the author trying to launder their own personal distastes aesthetic distaste through a ham fisted attempt to deploy Marxist terminology (&quot;fetishize&quot;, &quot;erasing&quot;, &quot;bourgeois&quot;) at suburban denizens rather than any real reckoning with the political economy of the commodities that they even reference.<p>Surely, America is in many ways a deeply, tragically uncool, suburban place where many people &quot;just want to grill, for god&#x27;s sake.&quot; But, it is that way unapologetically -- in some ways, unapologetic in a way that should maybe never be apologized for. America&#x27;s suburbs are the promised land where so many people the world over seek a reality that maybe isn&#x27;t perfect but an improvement to their current lot in life. It is a place of sameness, vacuum of space, and twee; it is a place of rurality and peaceful escape from society. It is a place where profound works of irony, satire and excess (unintentional and intentional) originate from; it is this excess which hypothecates Hollywood&#x27;s culturally productive and originative influence not just in America but the world over; horrifying, to be sure, but also beautiful. Frustrating, at times, and yet sublime. To neither grasp nor express such a giant, sprawling plurality and how a thing of almost fractal bifurcations of seeming contradictions doesn&#x27;t just fall over, is to me proof that perhaps this piece of writing still needs a good amount more revision, additional detail, and conceptual depth before it actually makes a statement. It&#x27;s a shame because there very likely is a fascinating connection between pop minimalism and neo-farmhouse aesthetics there to be explored. But frankly, it would need to be explored by an author with a deft enough understanding of the people and communities who actually live in the areas they comment on to actually represent them thoughtfully -- or at least someone who had the desire to gain such an understanding.