TRADING SPACES AND THE WORSHIP OF EXPERTS

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TRADING SPACES AND THE WORSHIP OF EXPERTS

James Joyner | Sunday, September 21, 2003

Loosely apropos the experience and leadership theme of this morning is Aaron Haspel’s excellent post on the Trading Spaces television show, which he dubs, the Apotheosis of the Expert.

Along with the glories of the division of labor comes, perhaps necessarily, the worship of the specialist. The deference accorded physicians, scientists, and experts of all sorts never ceases to astonish me. Of all specialists the artist gets the best deal: physicians lose face if their patients die, scientists if they produce bogus results, and artists never, so long as they can continue to intimidate their clients, which, aesthetic criteria being notoriously ineffable, is a relatively simple matter. Nice work if you can get it, and unsurprisingly sub- and sub-sub-artists, like interior decorators, have begun to muscle in on the racket.

As a rule, the worse the artist, the more insistently he drapes himself in artistic trappings. So it is on Trading Spaces. The decorators are not decorators but “designers.” Talk of “themes” abounds and inevitably precurses disaster. Novels have themes. Does your bedroom? Would you prefer it if it did?

Indeed.

Aaron does a superb critique of the eight designers on the show that is dead-on.

(Hat tip: Craig Henry)

About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter.

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