The Visual Æsthetics of Cheesecake Factories: (LATE) FRIDAY FOG & FLATLANDS
The Cheesecake Factory look: fine for avocado egg rolls; terrible for the public buildings of a Great Republic. Trump (and the Wall Street Journal) did not dare say a peep at Obama’s comparison of him to a dictator, but it was the claim that his æsthetic taste thought a chain restaurant was the height of luxury appears to have stung:
Barack Obama is not a very nice guy these days.
But I do not think a nice guy is what we need right now:
Barack Obama: ‘I had heard the president was not happy when I joked over the weekend that he’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory….
The president wasn’t even mad about the Saddam Hussein comparison. That part didn’t bother him. But he was very upset about the Cheesecake Factory comments…
Now we all know that the Cheesecake Factory has decided that it is going to have a deliberate look as part of its brand. And rather few of us think that that look is appropriate for the public spaces of a Great Republic. Indeed, Donald Trump does not: He was really angry that Barack Obama mocked him by saying that that the Cheesecake Factory look was the look he was trying for.
The Wall Streat Journal, like Trump, did not dare to appear unhappy with the Saddam Hussein comparison. But they seemed to think, or to want to say and pretend to think, that looking like a Cheesecake Factory was 100% appropriate for the public spaces of a Great Republic. Thus we have this here:
Wall Street Journal Editorial Board: Obama Goes Socialist, Scorns Cheesecake <https://www.wsj.com/opinion/barack-obama-angie-nixon-cheesecake-factory-bf1303ce>: ‘He throws in with Florida’s Angie Nixon and condescends to Middle America: President Obama has delivered another condescending classic. Campaigning for Democrats in Ohio this weekend, he said that President Trump’s redecorations have the White House “looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” The same day, Mr. Obama endorsed a socialist as Florida’s next U.S. Senator.
Making fun of chain restaurants is quite an angle for Democrats, who keep insisting that they haven’t forgotten the working man in Middle America. The Cheesecake Factory has a couple of hundred locations, the company says, so it must be doing something deliciously right. But to all of those diners in Cleveland, Grand Rapids, and beyond, here’s Mr. Obama’s message: How déclassé…
Anyone who thinks about this for more than a minute will note that Donald Trump does not disagree with Barack Obama here. Trump did not respond: “Yes! The Cheesecake Factory look is great! That is exactly what I was going for!”; did he?
No.
He was deeply and mortally offended (as he is deeply and mortally offended by pretty much everything). But look at what offended him. He shrugged off the comparison to a murderous Ba’athist dictator. What he could not stand was the suggestion that his taste is middlebrow. The gold is supposed to say “Versailles,” or at least “Mar-a-Lago.” Obama said it says “suburban mall, near the Macy’s, forty-five-minute wait on a Friday night”. That stung because Trump knows exactly what the Cheesecake Factory look is. He does not want to be caught wanting to reproduce it.
Moreover, I do not think Middle America believes that the Cheesecake Factory look belongs in the public spaces of a Great Republic. That look is fine for, well, a Cheesecake Factory.
I like the place well enough:
The portions are enormous.
The menu is a 250-item novella.
Nobody will judge you for ordering the avocado eggrolls.
Carbmaxxxing has its place (at least for younger people with less creaky digestions), and it is good for carbmaxxxing.
But a Cheesecake Factory is, by design, one of those things that the French anthropologist Marc Augé has called a “non-place”: like an airport lounge, a highway rest stop, or a chain hotel, it is meant to look the same in Cleveland Ohio as in Grand Rapids Michigan as in Walnut Creek California. It is supposed to be familiar, and of little account because familiar. Its job is to have no special history and no real location and no different character, so you can walk in anywhere and know exactly where you are.
That is a fine design goal for a restaurant chain.
It is a terrible design goal for the White House. A White House is supposed to be the opposite of a non-place: It is one specific building. It has one specific history. It belongs to one specific people.
And it gets worse.
Nobody thinks the Cheesecake Factory is luxury. Nobody is supposed to think so. The gilt columns, the heavy drapes, the faux-Egyptian-Moorish-Venetian lighting fixtures are, in Jean Baudrillard’s terms, a simulation of luxury that isn’t even trying to fool you.
Everyone is in on the joke.
The point is to feel, for an evening, comfortably adjacent to the idea of opulence, at a price point that makes it a very reasonable Tuesday. A cheap and comfortable knockoff of luxury is a perfectly honorable thing to sell. But when that look moves into the Oval Office, it says something else. It says we have a government interested neither in the substance of power, nor in the weight of history, nor even in real wealth, but only in the image of wealth: a cheap homage to the imago of being successful.
So who, then, actually thinks the public spaces of a Great Republic should look like a Cheesecake Factory? Not Obama. Not, by his own furious admission, Trump. Not, I think, the diners of Cleveland and Grand Rapids and Walnut Creek, who know perfectly well the difference between a fun night out and the seat of government. The only people who claim to think so are the members of the Wall Street Journal editorial board. Or rather, they pretend to.
For note what they are doing. They are putting on a performance of populism: a defense of the honest working man and his honest chain-restaurant cheesecake against the sneering coastal elite. But the people writing those editorials are not defending the working man’s taste. They are not even defending the Cheesecake Factory. They are defending the proposition that a rich and powerful man may treat the people’s house as his private showroom, and that anyone who objects is a snob. That is a very different thing.
I would not be taking any risk in betting a large sum that the Journal’s editorial writers do not, when choosing where to take someone to lunch, suggest the Cheesecake Factory. For none of them have ever suggested it.
What, then, would “appropriate” mean for White House architecture and decoration?
It is not a matter of high taste versus low taste. Plenty of great civic architecture is plain. The Lincoln Memorial is not gilded. Monticello is red brick. What the public spaces of a Great Republic need is stability, continuity, and a shared civic dignity: the sense that the room was there before this president and will be there after him, and that it belongs to all of us rather than to whoever currently holds the lease. That is precisely what cannot be ordered out of a corporate interior-design catalog, at any price point.
So this argument is not really about whether Barack Obama is being “nice,” or whether the Wall Street Journal is right or wrong about a restaurant. It is about whether the public spaces of our government should express a shared civic identity that we hold in common across generations, or should be one more franchise location of a brand that is, by design, a not-very-luxurious simulation of luxury. One of those is a Great, or perhaps a Once-Great, Republic. The other is a chain restaurant.