And yet, something kept bugging me, just a bit at first but nearly driving me mad by the end.
It was the chandeliers in the main ballroom. They were gold and crystal. Sounds great and they were, in principle. They consisted of two or three concentric circles, really rings within rings. That might have been perfect.
The key is that the second and third rings were tilted as if falling. It was disorienting, to say the least. It’s supposed to be a twist on the traditional, a “daring” re-interpretation of a traditional chandelier.
It wasn’t that big of a deal, at first. But it kept grating on me. I felt like some designer somewhere, and some fool who paid the big bucks for these things, was targeting me personally.
The fix was obvious. The top ring was fine but the lower rings needed to fall underneath and straightened to make it symmetrical and beautiful.
Fix this stupid chandelier, I kept thinking.
If there had been a huge ladder and tools, I would have done it myself.
Lacking that, my mind kept drifting upwards. I tried repeatedly to ignore them but it was impossible. By the end of the event, the entire room became consumed by these mildly postmodern creations. My imagination fixed them countless times, moving their shapes around to settle the room and the aesthetic.
I kept asking myself why. Who approved these lighting fixtures? Surely some person with an art degree who prevailed upon the CEO.
How much did they pay for each? We could be talking six figures, I just don’t know. The hotel was renovated only recently and these were part of that.
Regardless, some artist or some company convinced some buyer and decorator to do this. It is a huge mistake. They spoiled or at least compromised the most important room in the entire hotel.
You could say that this is really nothing and I congratulate you if this is not a subject that rubs you wrong. Great. But actually, even if you don’t consciously take note of it, art like music brings a certain character to life experiences. It sets a mood and conveys a spirit. It crawls into the psychology of a room.
Think about it this way. You walk into a bar. Speakers are playing Haydn string quartets. You feel and act a certain way. You walk into another bar and they are playing “Celebrate” by Kool and the Gang. You feel and act in a different way. You can favor one over the other but there is no denying that it matters.
Decor in a room does the same, even if you are not conscious of it.
Back to these chandeliers. They are hardly the worst offender out there. However, they do represent this strange penchant for choosing something that is just off enough not to be “traditional.” But in making this choice against known standards of what constitutes the beautiful, they are not just rejecting something. They are embracing another.
What have they embraced? They are putting on display the distorted, the odd, the off-kilter, the peculiar, and heresy. It is perhaps designed to make us think. But think about what? I think about how messed up this is.
What is accomplished by this? Nothing. What do we gain by puzzling about why these contraptions look odd instead of correct? Nothing.
So far as I can tell, such designs achieve no positive outcome for human life. They exist in a parasitic relationship to what came before, messing it up just enough to draw attention. But their meaning has no integrity on its own. Its meaning is entirely derivative and even destructive of what came before.
Without the tradition of which these designs are making a mess, they would have no integrity. All of which raises the question: What precisely is the point? Who and what is being elevated here? So far as I can tell, there is no elevation but only degradation.
Civilization cannot thrive under the theory that everything that has been in the past must be deconstructed and gradually eviscerated. That is not creativity. It is depletion. You are left with nothing at all beyond a past that was once great but is now gone.
At this moment, with one-hundred-plus years of experience, what was called modernism, to say nothing of postmodernism, has just become boring and tiresome. It is no longer challenging and daring. We are neither challenged nor dared. We are just sick of it.
For centuries after the rise of late medieval art, music, and architecture, the goal has always been to find ever more wonderful ways to elevate the human spirit. That sense lasted until the Great War, which shocked the creators of the world. It introduced humanity to the ghastliness of senseless destruction and mass death, the use of technology to harm and wreck what came before.
Art, music, architecture, and interior decor faced a genuine crisis. Is the purpose of art to be aspirational or purely descriptive of what is around us? The aspirations gradually died. The descriptions of reality were deeply unpleasant because reality was terrible. We were told over and over to deal with it: the world is a mess and so is the art.
The problem with that view is that it robs aesthetics of ideals. Without them, there is only a downward spiral.
Legend has it that there was an earthquake sometime around 1492 in Flanders. The great composer Antoine Brumel (c. 1460–1512) wrote a Mass called “Missa Et ecce terrae motus,” which translates to: “And behold, the earth moved.” The text concerns the earthquake that happened at the Resurrection, but which also happened in the composer’s lifetime. It is an astonishingly gorgeous piece of music, full of terrible drama but with an eye toward heaven.
I think about that piece often in light of the great debate over art. The job of art is to rise above the muck and sadness, present in every age and in all places, to present what is great, beautiful, and true. An earthquake representing the triumph of life over death: what a fascinating image!
At some uncertain point, there seemed to be a consensus that the job of art is to reveal the worst and force it upon us constantly while ignoring the good.
I do think that period is ending and suffering a natural death because the ethos created nothing. The Brutalist buildings are gradually being torn down. The goofiest of museums are closing. The ugliest of “high-brow” music (the 12-tone row and atonalism) is now rarely heard in concert halls. Even the most aggressive of political art is being erased from the sides of buildings in cities.
However, the mild habit of choosing the weird and distorted over the traditional and beautiful is still with us. It’s a kind of reflex, as if our whole generation fears just embracing what is beautiful, true, proportional, and delightful, as if we know there is something wrong with all that. So instead we select things that are just slightly off to be safe.
That’s the thing about modernism and postmodernism. We don’t really believe in them anymore. But we don’t know what should replace them. Surely not the past, since that has been so relentlessly attacked and debunked. As a result, we are at sea, without moorings.
I put myself in the position of whoever was in charge at this Grand Hyatt and wondered what I would have done. The solution to the decor in this room seems obvious. Get traditional lighting, wonderful and traditional chandeliers that settle the scene and elevate the senses. Why not?
Traditionalism is the new daring, the new radicalism, the new disruptive. It takes a bold vision simply to say: long ago, they had it right and we messed it up. Let’s just admit it and learn from the past. Let us revel in the truths that were once known and tragically forgotten.
These so-called chandeliers are hardly the worst offenders. They are barely part of the problem. But I’ve become intolerant of all these pointlessly annoying distortions. Humankind once aspired to know and reveal what was beautiful. Let’s unabashedly embrace this again, insofar as we can, and resist the temptation to add a visual distortion just for the heck of it.
