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, archaic, and 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 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.
