I'm a Fan: A Novel

by Sheena Patel

What is taste? Who determines the architecture of taste? What kind of person are you to be intimately invested in acquiring antique Welsh stick chairs to accent a room, or to deliberately curate an association between said chairs and your personhood to other people, to be the kind of person who other people say of you when you’re not there, oh they have such good taste. Who decides these things? How do you acquire this knowledge of how to strip a room back but still convey luxury? What does it say about your person when you know what these desirable objects are? What does it say about your femininity if you know how to make a room pleasing? Knowing how to make a home is the ultimate wreath to crown your femininity. Where do you attain the confidence and the certainty to impose and expand yourself and your tastes onto four walls of a room and what does it say about you when you can’t do this? What if the objects are there because they are functional and not to inspire envy in others? Where the chair you buy is to be sat on, not to be looked at and not sat on because it is too precious to be used or where the addition of your body will jeopardise the value of the object. How do you know how to elevate your life to art, something to be admired, envied, aspired to? Aren’t these wealthy aesthetes on Instagram merely another iteration of a class elite deciding what is good and what is not good, shaping our reality the way they always have just better disguised by technology whic...