Marie-Antoinette was bored with all the fancy rooms and whatnot in Versailles, so she had her very own Epcot village built a mile away so she could slum it like Lil’ Kim. Seriously. It goes on and on, fake rivers, fake buildings, pruned gardens, rolling hills, and now wildly-obese American tourists get to roam around it, like we have at Epcot, too. All they need is a Sbarro and a Panda Express, and it’ll be just like home…
Here’s Lil’ M-A’s very own Loew’s-style, sticky-floored, super-sized cineplex near the faux ‘petit village’. There’s room up front for an orchestra, and little windows on the upper left and right for even more musicians, now all ready for some teeny-tiny Bose surround-sound speakers to blast some crunk-ass Jerry Bruckheimer plasma joint up in da membrane, yo.
A cute-as-hell nicotine café in the hood, on the rue Buci. Everyone’s eating snails, awaiting the next work strike and the next Steven Seagal movie. Got a light?
And now for the PBS portion of your program, time you learned something new (besides the fact that though I love France, I don’t take it too seriously). I do tend to get hardcore about this stuff, so bear with me while I ignore my… uh, nevermind.
This big ol’ slab of furniture is in The Louvre, and it’s by a fairly well-known maker by the name of André-Charles Boulle (1742-1732). Boulle perfected a type of inlay that now bears his name, an inlay of brass or pewter set into tortoiseshell (and sometimes the other way around). If you’re a D-I-Y/Home Depot kinda person, you’ll want to know he took a sheet of flattened tortoiseshell (not easy to make to begin with) and a sheet of brass, sandwiched them together, and cut out a design with an early version of a coping saw. The result was a puzzle of sorts, and he could fit the resulting brass piece inside the larger shell piece that was outlined and cut the same way, and vice versa, if he wanted to. Glue the whole thing onto a oak wood plank and you have a fancy-pants panel that you can use on any flat surface. Oh, and charge big, pre-euro prices for it.
Boulle’s workshop was in the Louvre (it was a swanky version of an industrial park before it became a palace and later, a museum), and he just cranked the stuff out. Trouble was, he couldn’t stop going to auctions and buying artwork and stuff beyond his means, so he was always in debt and pissing everybody off, so much so that they ganged up and went to king Louis XIV to complain. Unfortunately, a massive fire, due to some errant cigarette no doubt, burned down half his workshop (and many a priceless work of art) at some point. Boulle got a little bit of a reprieve, but he still managed to piss off everybody right ‘til the end. Corny and predictable as it sounds, I sure would’ve loved to have been there to hear some powdered and bewigged French fry exclaim ‘Zees ees Boulle-sheet!’ or some Mel Brooks-inspired variation thereof.
He never put his name on anything he made, so that’s reason enough for furniture historians to hate him right there. But since the royal household always hired lackeys to keep incredibly detailed inventories of every thing not nailed down, we know what was at least bought from the A-C-B workshop. These days we can expect to see one of his rare pieces, in good condition, to fetch up to $1-2 million at auction. That’s Bill-Gates-kind-of-money, and sure enough, Mr. G. collects old French furniture like this; he probably has a couple of these boullilicious thangs in the guestroom already.
So next time you find yourself in a museum with European decorative arts, whether it’s in Cleveland, New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, or wherever, impress your companions with your offhand identification of rampant Boulleshit. Chances are, if you see all that fancy inlay, it’s by André 1700. Just call it a Louis XIV Boulle desk, or armoire, or bidet, or roach clip, whatever it is, and listen for the oohs and aahs that either mean ‘you’re just brilliant’ or ‘where the hell did that come from?’.
Link to More Boulleshit at the Getty
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