On my Pinterest page is a neighborhood of elaborately decorated homes—mostly in California— that surely cost millions of dollars. They overlook humid forests, stands of bamboo, palm trees, and bougainvillea. There are well-manicured gardens with stiff hand-crafted chairs and inviting hammocks waiting for occupants. There is also an arsenal of furniture: an angular Gio Ponti chair, a mirrored Paul Evans cabinet, a Nakashima desk, a Wharton Esherick table that could be the Nakashima’s brother, and a pear green velvet Nanna Ditzel sofa.
The board started out as a way to collect ideas for furnishing my new home, pinning images of the type of furniture I was looking for (but could never afford), color schemes, shapes and styles. The sofa we ended up buying was pear green—though not Danish, and on sale from Macy’s. Yet still in another room in my house, in some fictional room in a far-off corner, all these pieces still exist, and somehow still feel like mine.
There are also multiple items I’ve painfully lost in online auctions. These are the objects I nearly owned. I go back repeatedly to visit my lost items one by one. Hello, little owl table stand. Hello, rattan Ficks Reed sofas. You were once going to sit in the corner of my living room; now you sit quietly in this corner of the Internet, where I visit with you in two dimensions. Hello, twenty plastic orange mid-century spatulas that I never needed but still wanted anyway.
I own you now.
This is largely the purpose of Pinterest: to replicate people’s desire to collect—be it clothes, hairstyles, images, quotes, food, music, or wallpaper samples—anything that collectively becomes a representation of who we are. Whether or not we ever actually physically encounter these objects is, in some way, utterly irrelevant. These things aren’t really ours, and yet they symbolize us, they are us. We feel real connection to and ownership of them, even if only for the moment we look at it there on the screen.
Artwork, too, is a powerful—and more slippery—element in our cabinets of curiosity. I went through a period where I was fascinated by the art of Eyvind Earle. I searched the Internet for an affordable piece of his art far and wide, with no luck. So instead I began pinning my favorites, one by one. Now I have a little gallery of my own, where Earle’s art sits next to pieces by Ed Ruscha, Charley Harper, and a few Mola tapestries I found (but did not buy) on eBay. And here, in this space, I do own these pieces. Here they rest, just where I put them, for whenever I want to dwell on a Ruscha, a Harper, an Earle. Who needs the physical object of the print when I can just step inside my Pinterest gallery for a private viewing?
In much the same way that people go to a museum and photograph the Mona Lisa, or buy the postcard, or a poster, or a bag with Van Gogh’s Sunflowers printed on it, this is the closest we non-billionaires will come to owning that masterpiece. What we can’t create or buy, we pin or Tumbl—so that we might own.
We are online hoarders of the things we want but will ultimately never really own, curators of Amazon Wish Lists of hopes and dreams, gun-shy about commitment. I’m sure that someone somewhere is using these wish lists properly, saving for later with the actual intent to buy, crossing items off their list upon delivery. But last I checked, my Amazon Wish List contained a Patti Smith book of photographs and some cooktop cleaner—both of which I never bought, neither of which I’m not quite sure I need or want anymore.
And that’s the thing, our desire is momentary, fleeting, and easily sated. Most of the time I no longer desire the things I’ve bookmarked, the things I’ve pinned. Release from desire is precisely what these pinboards and wish lists give us. The ability to interact with an item, to feel as if it temporarily belongs to us, to remind us of our personal aesthetic—and then release it into the wild. We can visit these things once in awhile, to remember what we were looking for at that moment in our lives: something we owned once, if only in our hearts. We may give up sitting in that well-designed chair, feeling that trench coat’s firm cinch around our waists. But we gain an ephemeral yet powerful signifier of our selves and our desires. In this sphere more than ever, things are not things but gestures—towards who we want to be, and who we see ourselves as.
Zan McQuade is a writer, editor, photographer, translator, and baseball enthusiast living in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her words and images can be found at www.thatcupoftea.com.
Photo by /kallu/Flickr