pain quotidien

Whenever I go to New York, I like to take pictures of stores, buildings, and window displays.

I do this in LA sometimes, too. But when you live in a city, you become blind to it. You don’t see things anymore because you see them too much. Sometimes you have to go to a new place to be able to see things again.

You can tell a lot of things about people by how they act when they visit a new city. And if it’s New York, it’s hard not to get caught up in a feeling of better than or less than. I do it myself.

For instance.

I walked by Abercrombie and Fitch on Fifth Avenue the other day, and people were waiting in line to get inside. I’m not a fan of Abercrombie and Fitch to begin with, but I can’t see waiting in line to get into a store that is in most malls everywhere in America when you’re in New York City. In my mind, you go wait in line to do stuff you cannot do when you’re at home. Or see things that you cannot see when you’re at home.

But then, I was talking to somebody who had gone to see the Picasso exhibit at the MOMA while in New York this past weekend. I’ve been to the MoMA before, and I’m not a Picasso fan, so even if going to that particular art museum does qualify for my things-I-cannot-do-while-I-am-at-home rule, going to the MOMA was not my first priority for this trip.

But this person, when I mentioned that some of the store displays I had been taking pictures of had been inspired by Picasso, laughed that kind of half-laugh in that underhanded, dismissive way of the intellectual snob. The kind of dismissive way that might have bothered me years ago, back when the divide between high and low culture really meant something to me, and I needed to prove how cultured I was by doing things like visiting art museums while I was at blogging conferences so that I could then go and talk about them at parties.

But then I thought, who is really the douchebag here?

Am I not doing the same thing to the Abercrombie line-waiters as this guy is doing to me, scoffing at me drooling over Balenciaga displays at Bergdorf Goodman instead of looking at high art at MOMA with the cultural elite? Who is to say what is time well spent? Maybe going to Abercrombie on Fifth Avenue isn’t the same as it is wherever they are from. Maybe the fact that there is a line to get into this Abercrombie, coupled with the promise of something sort of familiar (something that they do have at home) is what appeals to them in the first place?

Maybe douchebaggery is in the eye of the beholder.

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