The Red Dragon wants the Horta museum

I'm a happy little consumer these days because I bought the F-word an awesome birthday present, albeit two and a half months early, for an event three months away. And then I couldn't keep it a surprise because I was too excited about it to not tell him. It doesn't really count as I probably would have bought him the ticket even if he didn't like Nick Cave just so he'd come with me, so I'll have to find something else.

Busy weekend. Highlight was going to Horta's house. We'd been wanting to for awhile, but me having a pathological horror of queues, hadn't. It opens at 2 every afternoon and by 3 there's a line up to 20 people long stretching onto the street. But a friend who was visiting from Paris had a particular yen to go, so we showed up as the door opened, and it was lovely. Not a mansion tour, not a gawkfest; Horta's house was a perfect little model home, illustrating how to create an illusion of great space whilst maintaining a cosy sort of feeling - how to have luxury combined with friendliness. There was a fucking urinal next to the bed, for God's sake.

I love Art Nouveau and looking around the house gave me a bittersweet feeling. As a movement, there was something beautiful about it that wasn't just the beauty of the objects and the curves and everything. There was the notion that now that they had the cheap technology in terms of steel supports and concrete, everybody should be able to have a lovely, practical space to live in. It was the last time beauty mattered like that, I think, when people were excited by the idea that even poor types could enjoy pretty staircases and whatnot. I know that seems frivolous, considering the lives poor people were leading in Europe when Art Nouveau was a force, not to mention now. But to me it's not frivolous. There's the idea that people who aren't rich should have more than just the basic sustenance that will let them survive and reproduce to keep toiling along in the interests of the rich; that they deserve, by virtue of being human, the sort of aesthetic pleasure in their homes that only rich people got, before or since. To me, in Art Nouveau, there's the seed of a sort of commie idea I could really get behind - that everybody deserves more than survival, and that in an equal society beauty would be more evenly distributed, and not condemned as bourgeois.

Mind you, at the Horta house you couldn't see the kitchens and the servant's quarter's were off-limits, which makes me think they probably weren't departures from the deeply exploitative norm of those days. So Horta himself might have thought I was talking dangerous sedition out my ass.