Why Weird Things Are More Interesting Than Perfect Ones

Perfect is easy to understand.

It sits where it is supposed to sit. The colors match. The edges are clean. Nobody has to stare at it for ten seconds trying to figure out what the hell they’re looking at.

And that is probably why perfect gets boring so fast.

Give me something slightly wrong instead.

A painting with proportions that feel strange. A house that looks like nobody has opened the curtains since 1974. A ridiculous roadside attraction. An ugly little ceramic animal at a thrift store that absolutely should not cost twelve dollars but somehow needs to come home with you.

That stuff sticks.

Not because it is beautiful in the traditional sense.

Because it makes your brain stop walking in a straight line.

Weird Makes You Pay Attention

Most of the world is designed to be understood immediately.

Stores want you to know where to walk. Apps want you to know where to click. Advertising wants you to recognize the product before you have even finished looking at the picture.

Everything is fighting to remove friction.

Weirdness puts some of it back.

You see something unusual and your brain has to hang around for a second.

What the hell is that?

That extra second matters.

Psychological research into grotesque artwork has found meaningful differences in how much people enjoy bizarre, disturbing, or repulsive imagery, with traits such as openness to experience and sensation seeking among the factors associated with greater interest. In other words, some of us really are more inclined to walk toward the strange thing instead of away from it. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

That explains a lot of my shopping decisions.

Not Everything We Like Has to Be Pretty

Somewhere along the way, we started acting like enjoying something means finding it beautiful.

That makes no sense.

People like abandoned buildings.

People collect old medical equipment.

People decorate entire rooms with taxidermy, dolls, funeral antiques, rusty signs, plastic aliens and paintings that look like somebody had a nervous breakdown halfway through finishing them.

Nobody needs any of that.

That is exactly the point.

Sometimes the attraction isn't beauty.

It is character.

Something can be ugly, creepy, ridiculous or deeply questionable and still be far more interesting than the technically prettier thing sitting beside it.

Scientific American has written about the strange pull of gross and frightening imagery: disgust is supposed to make us avoid things, yet disgusting stimuli can also capture and hold attention unusually well. Scientific American

Apparently the human brain occasionally responds to absolutely not with hang on, let me see that again.

Fair enough.

Strange Things Usually Have Better Stories

Perfect objects can feel finished before you even meet them.

Weird things invite questions.

Who made this?

Why?

Was that intentional?

What possessed somebody to put those two things together?

Why does this painting look like the horse knows something I don't?

And sometimes there is no satisfying answer.

Even better.

The object becomes interesting because your own imagination has somewhere to go.

That is part of what I love about alternative culture in general. It leaves room for things that don't have to explain themselves immediately.

There does not need to be a committee-approved reason for every patch, tattoo, painting, shirt, song, haircut or fucked-up thing sitting on your bookshelf.

Sometimes I liked it is enough.

Weird Is Personal

Mainstream taste usually works by agreement.

Enough people decide something looks good, sounds good or belongs somewhere, and eventually it starts feeling normal.

Weird taste is much harder to standardize.

What one person finds fascinating, another person looks at like it should be removed from the property.

That makes it personal.

Research into subcultures has found that people may participate in different subcultural spaces partly because those communities offer identities and alternatives that mainstream culture does not. Sage Journals

That doesn't mean everybody who owns a creepy clown painting is making a profound sociological statement.

Sometimes you just like the creepy clown.

But being able to choose something because you respond to it—not because everybody agreed beforehand that you should—is part of the appeal.

Perfect Is Easy to Sell

This may be the bigger problem with perfect.

Perfect scales beautifully.

It photographs well. It fits a trend board. It works in fifty stores. Nobody has to explain it.

Then enough people buy it and suddenly everybody's kitchen looks the same.

Everybody's apartment has the same beige chair.

Everybody's clothes start coming from the same five references.

Everybody is being sold individuality from the same fucking catalog.

Weirdness resists that a little longer.

Not forever. Somebody will eventually discover it, mass-produce it and call it a trend.

They always do.

But before that happens, weird things still have a little friction left in them.

Maybe That's Why We Keep Finding Them

I don't think people are drawn to strange things because they are trying to prove how different they are.

At least, not most of the time.

I think some things simply wake us up a little.

They interrupt the visual wallpaper.

They make us curious.

They make us laugh.

They make us uncomfortable in a way we actually enjoy.

They remind us that not everything has already been sorted into good, bad, pretty, ugly, normal and wrong.

Sometimes the thing that shouldn't work is the thing you remember.

Sometimes the ugly thing has more personality than the beautiful one.

And sometimes you buy the weird little thrift-store animal because leaving it there would clearly be irresponsible.

I don't make the rules.

Rose Baxter