How to see the miraculous beauty in everyday life

One of the most penetrating things that

the artist Andy Warhol once said was,

"If you lock the doors of a department

store for a hundred years, when you open

them up again, it will be a museum."

In other words, all those objects of

everyday use, our toasters and sneakers,

our tights and perfumes, will eventually

speak to our successors of an era we

don't even notice ourselves living in,

but which will seem as distinctive,

interesting to them as the civilizations

of the Phoenicians or the Habsburgs do

to us. Today's cotton and polyamide

duvet covers, shower curtains, and

Tupperware boxes are still indiscernible

objects of record and pregnant, complex

testaments to an as yet unnamed

historical moment. As imperceptibly as a

continent moving millimeter by

millimeter across an ocean, time is

bearing us, along with our motley

baggage of scented candles and lava

lamps, coat hangers and picture frames,

rolling suitcases and hair dryers, over

to an unknown world.

However, Warhol wasn't just trying to

draw our attention to how silently eras

shift. He was also making a point about

reverence and its sharp and unfortunate

misallocation.

When we step into museums like the

Louvre or the Metropolitan Museum of

Art, the Rijksmuseum or the Hermitage,

we are almost always in a mood of

immense and heightened respect.

We whisper as if in the presence of

deities. We take in the captions in

illuminated cabinets. A bronze vessel

from the Shang Dynasty, a comb from the

late period, a snuff box from the reign

of Louis the XIV.

All as if we were reading lines from a

holy text. And yet, looked at from

another angle, what are we really

looking at as we make our way around

these august halls other than the

contents of a giant, old shopping

catalog.

Warhol had nothing against shopping

catalogs. In fact, he once described the

one from Macy's as the greatest work of

literature of the 20th century,

decisively surpassing in interest and

humanity the novels of Thomas Mann or

Marcel Proust. What angered him, and

inspired much of his art, was how

disrespectful we tend to be of the

everyday, in contrast to how

deferentially awed we are of anything

that is historically endorsed and

heralded. He yearned to help us to wake

up to the overlooked beauty, grandeur,

subtlety, and charm of grocery stores

and burger bars, airplane galleys and

hair salons, inflatable bathing pools

and deck chairs. He didn't want us to

wait a hundred years before appreciating

our lives. He didn't want us to be on

our deathbeds before we ever noticed how

strange and fascinating everything

happens to be. He thought it a crime

that we might walk through the world

paying so much attention to a celadon

glaze ceramic vase from the Song Dynasty

and so little to a box of cheese straws

from Gristedes.

His art was a distinctive, passionate

attempt to accelerate the process of

cultural appreciation and love.

All this is more than a point about

aesthetics. It's an invitation to a

revolution in living. We are in a

constant struggle to remain aware of the

miraculousness of things. The pencil

we're using and the trousers we're

wearing right now are wholly peculiar

and entirely mesmerizing. The packet of

biscuits in the kitchen is a minor work

of art. The chat you've just had with a

friend is, from a certain angle,

literature. How you would notice it all

if you were going to die tomorrow, or if

you'd returned from the year 4509,

or if you were 5 years old. None of

these may be possible or desired options

for us, but nor do they need to be. We

can use the thought that someone from a

century hence will find us quite rightly

gripping in order to value ourselves a

little more fairly in the here and now.

We should imagine that we are already

living in a museum, the largest and most

interesting museum that's ever existed,

around which are scattered an infinite

number of invisible captions, as

important as any to be found in

Versailles or Sanssouci, waiting for us

to wake up and read them.

We need to keep rehearsing the message

because of how tightly despair and habit

have us in their grip. Right now is

extraordinary. Today is unique.

Everything is exceptional. All should be

constant. You contain galaxies.

We should not have to wait till our

world has been lost to see and derive

sustenance from its beauty.