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People develop all sorts of secret fantasies when they’re in long-term relationships. Maybe it’s a one-night stand with a celebrity, or a weeklong escape to the South of France, alone. My current daydream, 10 years into my marriage, involves me choosing whatever image I want to hang on the blank white wall next to our kitchen. I’ve been harboring this illicit fantasy since the summer of 2021 when we moved into our home. I’m pretty sure my husband possesses a similar furtive longing. Only his imaginary wall hanging no doubt looks completely different from mine.
It turns out that I’m not the only coupled-up person in history to experience an art-related battle of wills. There are Reddit threads full of exasperated spouses lamenting the “ugly” paintings their partners hang without asking them. One of my favorites is a thread called “Husband only wants artwork we’ve made hanging in our house and I just cant.” The indignant wife goes on to explain that they are both terrible artists, and she doesn’t want “a bunch of kindergarten art” on their walls. Then there is the maximalist wife who is fed up with her husband’s “austere” and “Spartan” taste. She posted: “We’ve tried couples counseling and our counselor suggested we’d be better off bringing this to Reddit. Please help save our marriage!”
Our white wall hasn’t driven us to counseling, but we may need some sort of mediator to guide us. As Robert Dimin, owner of DIMIN gallery in lower Manhattan, told me, “It seems more and more the job of an art dealer is also falling into the therapist category. It’s personal, and you’re helping people navigate what they’re really earnestly looking for.”
Dimin said he sees one or two couples a month coming into the gallery with wildly different views on what they want. If they start arguing, he steps away and lets them hash it out. “I won’t touch it with a 10-foot pole,” he said of the prospect of leaping into the middle of an aesthetic cage match.
When you live alone, you only navigate these questions with yourself. You can put up whatever picture or painting you want, wherever you want. It could be a giant poster of the Backstreet Boys, an avant-garde photomontage you found at a local art fair, a generic decal that says “Home Sweet Home” in cursive. There is no compromise, no surrender. In a relationship, though, unless you are completely in sync with your tastes or one partner is mercifully apathetic about décor, you may find yourself in an epic standoff over a blank wall. Or maybe you just forget that you can’t agree on what to place in the space for long stretches of time because there are more pressing things afoot, like making sure you pay the rent and do your taxes.
“It’s a real problem for people,” said Colorado-based art consultant Delia LaJeunesse. When I asked her for advice about my situation, she said, “There’s got to be a surrender without compromising,” which sounds like an extremely tricky thing to pull off.
It’s not as if every inch of our house has been a battle. I have botanical prints and antique watercolors of birds in my office. There was zero discussion; I just picked. We did hash it out over an oil painting of some old-timey people from an era when people imbibed barleywine inside lantern-lit taverns. The picture belonged to my husband’s grandfather, and I don’t love it, but there’s sentimental value for him so I caved. It’s grown on me, as has the inky blue painting of some dilapidated fishing boats hanging in our bedroom. Another relative of my husband’s brought that piece back from a trip to Japan decades ago. At first, I loathed it. Now, after glancing at its dark indigo tones for four years, I find it soothing.
What I don’t find mesmerizing is the blank white wall. It’s not a dire marital issue, and obviously there are more pressing problems in the world. “It’s still significant,” Dimin said of our inability to fill the blank space outside of our kitchen. “You want a return on investment from a pleasure perspective. You don’t want it to be a tense moment between you every time you’re drinking coffee in the morning.”
About a year into our move, my husband did take some action. He printed out a 4-by-6 photograph of a rowboat on the water and Scotch-taped it to the center of our wall. The ideal size to hang on this wall is about 44 inches square, so just imagine how pathetic this tiny, drab (in my mind) boat image looked. “It’s just to see,” my husband said. I’d been dreaming of hanging a colorful painting created by human hands, a real piece of (reasonably priced) art, and here he was with the most boring photograph I could imagine. This image didn’t inspire me at all, so if he’d hung a 44-inch version, it probably would have led to some morning-coffee fights, or at least some extremely passive-aggressive sighs.
Instead of taking action myself and sticking up a 4-by-6 oil painting, I just let the little rowboat hang there—for three years. Every time discerning friends came by, they would make fun of us for keeping a tiny picture up on a large wall. To be honest, most days I forgot it was even there. But this summer our kitchen flooded, and one of the industrial-size fans we blasted to dry the floors mercifully blew the rowboat off the wall. Once again, our attention was drawn to the blank space, and our inability to “surrender without compromise.”
Clearly this wall isn’t a major priority, but it’s become a long-running game for us. What will we choose? Who will triumph? Will there ever be a 44-inch image we agree on? At least we’re not buying something out of spite and hanging it up without collaborating, right? Once the rowboat floated away, we started sending each other links to photos and paintings we each like. I’ve taken a step toward “surrender” by agreeing that we’ll put up some sort of photography. When I asked Elizabeth Denny, director of the Outsider Art Fair, for advice, she suggested looking at local artists and photographers and going to small-town art fairs.
“I feel like you’re missing a really big element of the fun, which is the artists,” she said. “Decenter yourselves and center the artists and their lives and their stories.”
We don’t have anywhere near a true art collector’s budget, but we could hit up a local small-town open-studios event and figure it out there. Or maybe we’ll just entertain ourselves for the next 10 years of our marriage by not deciding. Or maybe, just maybe, the blank white wall is art?! I’ve seen a dirty mop in the corner of a museum in Houston that had a plaque next to it explaining the artist’s intentions. To some, Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings probably look just like a blank white wall, yet they hang in major museums. Art is subjective! Come to think of it, maybe our marriage is one big living art installation, moving at its own pace, unfolding over time and symbolizing … something extremely profound? Or maybe we’re just being lazy.
In yet another attempt to break through to the other side of this debacle, I reached out to Julie Webb, who co-owns two folk-art galleries in Texas with her husband, Bruce. They just celebrated 40 years of marriage, so they know a thing or two about compromise. They’ve also seen plenty of couples waltz into their galleries and disagree.
“We’ve dealt with all kinds of people buying all kinds of things all kinds of ways,” Webb said. Her personal secret is that she and Bruce “take turns picking.” She tells me my husband and I should “go with your first gut reaction. Don’t doubt yourself, whether you’re picking art or deciding what to have for dinner.” The problem is that our guts are not reacting in harmony. They are on a collision course.
In December, my husband and son went on a “guys only” ski trip to Utah. On their trip, they wandered into a local art gallery and my husband texted me a bunch of images of photos and paintings. My response to each was a firm “Nope.” Maybe I need to start my own Reddit thread and crowdsource this issue.
There is hope for us yet, though. We’re going to Asheville, North Carolina, this summer, which is a town known for its art galleries. We’ve already talked about looking for a piece for the blank wall while we’re there. I intend to make it my mission to find something that is not a “Nope.” So, maybe, before another four years passes, we will cast all doubts aside, and the wall will no longer be blank. Will it be a black-and-white photo of an old barn? A colorful abstract painting? A photorealistic image of a pear? We may still be undecided, but one thing I have come to realize is that instead of dismissing each other’s picks outright, maybe we should ask each other one simple question: What do you see?
