Aesthetical Action: The Bling Thing

There are many purportedly refined objects that aim at elegance but succumb to bad taste, overburdened with needless decoration and meaningless frivolity. With these works, utility becomes a secondary consideration, verging on the enfeebled and morally corrupt.

-Soetsu Yanagi

Over the last 100 years, there has been a tendency to valorize humility in aesthetics, privileging humble materials like clay and earthenware, which are often put to utilitarian purposes, as worthy of aesthetic praise, while downplaying or even demonizing flashy materials and aesthetics. 

For this Aesthetical Action, I want you to channel your inner magpie—notoriously attracted to things that sparkle to bedeck their nests—and make a list of 3 to five bling things that get your attention and trigger your pleasure sensors.

Here's what's on what I call my 'Magpie List.'

1. Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

I once worked on a project that required me to spend more time at Tiffany’s than I ever thought possible. I remember turning a corner in the 5th Avenue store and turning a corner to see one of the largest amber diamonds I had ever seen. I gasped. The saleswoman near me smiled and said, “I do that every time I see it, and I see it every day.” 

That stone transfixed me, and the feeling of the moment is probably best captured by the opening moments of the film version of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, when Holly Golightly, played by Audrey Hepburn, mindlessly eats her breakfast while meditating on the gems on display in the window. She has to be looking at the same diamond.

2. My Rose Gold Filter:

Everything looks a little bit better with a touch of gold.

3. My Grandfather’s Pocket Watch

For a couple of years in grade school, I wore a pair of Osh Kosh B’Gosh overalls to school, which, in fairness, was a legitimate style in the 1970s. Still, the Overalls were really a kind of vessel for a precious, refurbished stopwatch that had been passed down from my grandfather, and for me, the look of the gold timepiece, its gold chain poking out of a humble denim coverall, was a deliberate aesthetic choice. 

I have no idea where that watch is, but I sometimes believe I will open a box in my basement or peek into some forgotten drawer and rediscover the precious thing. It’s so mythologized for me that to this day, I still can’t remember if it was really my grandfather’s (an Indiana steelworker’s watch seems unlikely) or if it even worked. But that’s the magnificence of that thing.

4. The Treasure of Tuttenkamen

The treasure that inspired all other treasures.

5. Golden Hour

If anything redeems gold for us, it’s the golden hour, that time of day when the light creeps into even the most bland space and pours golden light into well… something golden.