Dec Arts Are Hot*

There are thousands of blogs and websites out there dedicated to furniture and interior decorating - I try to stay away from them, honestly, because I can only handle having so many life fantasies at once.  (The one about cooking dinner from scratch five nights a week?  I'll keep that.  The one about walking into my dream home and seeing five pairs of wellies, neatly lined up next to each other in size order, under the wooden hall table and beside the raffia baskets of mittens and hats and scarves?  Sorry, it's just too much for me right now!)  But that doesn't mean I don't like decorative arts.  In fact, when I went to the National Gallery of Art the other week to check out Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop, I was waylaid by the most beautiful rooms full of masterpieces of American furniture from the Kaufman collection.

There's a difference between marking up every other page in the Pottery Barn catalogue and admiring these pieces, right?  After all, they're in a museum!  It's history, you know.  So that makes appreciating the collection totally okay.  Not sure if it's okay to wonder if I have a long-lost great-uncle somewhere who, when he dies, will leave me his incredible collection of antiques, but let's keep that fantasy between us, dear readers.

*My mother works at a museum and, when they did a furniture show, she came home and declared, "Dec arts are hot!  Brown furniture rocks!"  So I have to credit her for the title of this post - thanks, Mom!