Beautiful Things: Fake Flowers
By Crispin Sartwell
"Fake flowers are better than real," my five-year-old daughter Jane told me recently in a restaurant bestrewn with artificial phlox, "because they don't get all messed up."
I always thought of fake flowers as a signal failure of taste. Indeed, I think that even in a case where they look precisely the same, real flowers are beautiful and fake flowers are not.
Beauty is connected with time. What is beautiful is fragile or elusive. Experiencing something beautiful is poignant because it is a longing. The beautiful thing calls on us to long because it is already being lost.
This is as true of persons as of flowers and despite the efforts of cosmetic companies and plastic surgeons, a lovely girl is also a cut flower. "To the virgins, to make much of time."
The cut flower is, hence, not only beautiful, but a symbol of every beautiful thing - everything that blossoms, glows, and passes - which is why it accompanies the valentine, the wedding, and the funeral. The cut flower is the central beautiful object in our culture.
So even if they look the same, the real flower and the fake flower are antonyms: they mean oppositely.
But the longing that a fragile beautiful thing calls forth motivates us to hold onto it, preserve it, depict it, reproduce it. The movie starlet ages, but her image remains forever as a testimony to the moment of her bloom. Flowers themselves are one of the great subjects of painting, from Dutch painters such as Willem van Aelst who spent whole careers depicting them to Monet's water lilies.
The fake flower represents the same impulse on an everyday level: the other day I saw a bucket of fake blue roses for sale at a gas station, with fake blue rose scent.
Fake flowers are everywhere and they express something deep and common and sad and sweet: our inability to fully face losing what we love. Even in their ugliness, they capture and preserve our need for beauty.
