Human Flower Project
Miami, Florida USA
Denver, Colorado USA
Hollywood, California USA
Saturday, September 04, 2010
The Figure in the Carpet
Haughty artists and garish floral carpets set the fantasy-prone off on a harrowing trip to Obsession.
From Chris Maluszynski’s Las Vegas Carpets series
Image: via Wired
“The thing’s as concrete there as a bird in a cage, a bait on a hook, a piece of cheese in a mouse-trap.”
So insists novelist Hugh Vereker about the great and delicious “secret” that runs through all his writings. He’s egging on a small-time literary critic, the unnamed narrator in Henry James’s story The Figure in the Carpet, dropping psychic crumbs that will keep his ambitious young admirer reading, studying, yearning to crack the artist’s code.
We read James’s intriguing novella today, egged on ourselves by some queasily strident photographs of carpets in Las Vegas casinos. They were taken by Swedish photographer Chris Maluszynski and featured earlier this year by both the Daily Mail and, most recently, Wired. Both articles quote Dave Schwartz, a scholar based at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who’s studied the psychology of casino décor: odorants, floor plans, the cushions on stools, and timbre of slot machine bells. Schwartz says, “Casino carpet is known as an exercise in deliberate bad taste that somehow encourages people to gamble.”
What’s taste have to do with it? Presumably, taste is an exercise of judgment and discernment, while gambling—the compulsive sort that keeps people up all night, and the next night, standing at the roulette wheel – requires that something override judgment, even disrupting such basic survival mechanisms as appetite and fatigue.