Is Home Decorating a Lie?

The art of decorating is about taking a space, four walls and a roof, and making it look better than it would if the room was empty, or simply filled at random with items and accessories. Decorating is about putting your best foot forward, casting a room in a specific light that evokes emotions and thoughts, the most important of which is a sense of beauty which impresses your guests with your style and sophistication.

So this begs the question: since you are taking a space and doing things to make it look better than it actually is... is home decorating a form of lying?

In a crude sense all art is a lie. Every time we try to represent something which isn't really there, we are creating an illusion. It is an act of deception, which is not necessarily antagonistic. Instead it is often meant to delight the senses with the intrinsic beauty that is called up by the successful application of this act.

If you say that decorating is a lie, then you should also count paintings, music, movies, and books all as mediums for liars. To some extent, this is a fair comparison. They are all dealing with alternate realities, things which do not exist, or which exist elsewhere, independent of the actual media being employed.

On the other hand however, the point of art is to create beauty. As such, isn't art the truest thing possible? Beauty is something which touches all humans, regardless of location, culture, or upbringing. We may have differing opinions as to what specifically constitutes beauty, but we all understand its true nature deep within our conscious beings.

In this way, decorating is just a matter of taking concepts of beauty, a universal idea, and applying them to the world around us. This means it is not really a lie, but merely a revelation of the potential that exists within every space, every moment, every object in the world around us.

This article was written by Jim Slate on behalf of PebbleZ.com's line of artistic stone home décor products. Featuring a wide variety of mountain born materials, hand crafted into some of the most unique and interesting decorative products around, Pebblez.com is sure to have something this week that you simply haven't seen anywhere else.