Photo: John and Suzanne’s Mom.
On April 28, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s courtyard was featuring cineraria and foxglove.
Last Friday, after a medical appointment, I thought I would treat myself to the Isabella Stewart Gardner again, a museum located in a wealthy woman’s former palace not far from the Museum of Fine Arts. The extraordinary collection has been mostly left the way Gardner displayed it, so there are no plaques. You need to rent the audio tour.
The Gardner may be best known outside New England for the brazen heist of valuable artworks in 1990. Empty places on the walls attest to the unresolved loss.
I usually love going there, but to my surprise, the magic really wasn’t happening for me Friday. That wasn’t just because I wanted to see the nasturtium display and they’d already changed it to foxglove and cineraria, or because the timed tickets had done nothing to control overcrowding, or because a guard told me I wasn’t allowed to carry my coat over my arm.
No, it was something along the lines of “what is one person doing with so much wealth?”
I have fallen into overthinking things: Was that piece of fruit picked for a living wage? Are the clothes I wear from factories with good ventilation and frequent bathroom breaks?
And if “philanthropists” give us access to their beautiful things after they die, wouldn’t they have been more truly philanthropic if they had spent some of that wealth trying to abolish poverty?
On Mastodon, I read about Paris Review contributor Katy Kelleher’s new book. Her publisher says she “explores our obsession with gorgeous things, unveiling the fraught histories of makeup, flowers, perfume, silk, and other beautiful objects. …
“Katy Kelleher,” Simon & Schuster continues, “has spent much of her life chasing beauty. As a child, she uprooted handfuls of purple, fragrant little flowers from the earth, plucked iridescent seashells from the beach, and dug for turquoise stones in her backyard. As a teenager she applied glittery shimmer to her eyelids after religiously dabbing on her signature scent of orange blossoms and jasmine.
“And as an adult, she coveted gleaming marble countertops and delicate porcelain to beautify her home. This obsession with beauty led her to become a home, garden, and design writer, where she studied how beautiful things are mined, grown, made, and enhanced. In researching these objects, Kelleher concluded that most of us are blind to the true cost of our desires. Because whenever you find something unbearably beautiful, look closer, and you’ll inevitably find a shadow of decay lurking underneath.
“In these dazzling and deeply researched essays, Katy Kelleher blends science, history, and memoir to uncover the dark underbellies of our favorite goods. She reveals the crushed beetle shells in our lipstick, the musk of rodents in our perfume, and the burnt cow bones baked into our dishware. She untangles the secret history of silk and muses on her problematic prom dress.
She tells the story of countless workers dying in their efforts to bring us shiny rocks from unsafe mines that shatter and wound the earth, all because a diamond company created a compelling ad.
“She examines the enduring appeal of the beautiful dead girl and the sad fate of the ugly mollusk. With prose as stunning as the objects she describes, Kelleher invites readers to examine their own relationships with the beautiful objects that adorn their body and grace their homes.
“[Kelleher] argues that while we have a moral imperative to understand our relationship to desire, we are not evil or weak for desiring beauty. The Ugly History of Beautiful Things opens our eyes to beauty that surrounds us, helps us understand how that beauty came to be, what price was paid and by whom, and how we can most ethically partake in the beauty of the world.”
I think I need to read the book and see if it will help me deal better with the rampant overconsumption and privilege I am finally noticing.
Art: Anders Zorn.
Gardner herself enjoying a high old time in Venice.
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 