“I’ll do it later.”
“I’m doing homework.”
“I like it this way.”
By now you’ve probably heard every excuse under the sun for why your kid couldn’t possibly tidy their bedroom. Even though you daren’t set foot inside it for fear you might find something a) growing (those bowls of cereal never seem to come back downstairs) or b) living (who knows how many teenage girls could be living underneath that pile of clothes on the chair?), you’re fairly confident it’s a mess. And, heck, you have nostrils.
But what if your kid was actually a modern day artist? The next Tracy Emin? And what if those stinky socks and unclean jeans were really just installations in their own gallery?
An exhibition opening in London this week at the Geffrye Museum will let members of the public take a look into the bedrooms of 26 teenagers. It displays photographs of their rooms, “alongside a wall of objects salvaged from their lives–from prom pictures to chocolate wrappers,” reports the Telegraph.
The show has been curated by Carey Newsom, a doctoral researcher who wanted to explore the material culture of the teenage bedroom.
“The rooms are filled with objects and mementos from everyday activities, a sort of 3D scrapbook. Amber, 14, has a swing that broke under her in the park and a sofa she found abandoned on the side of the street. “Her mum wasn’t very pleased about it and kept offering to take it to the dump,” Newson says. “But teenagers want to bring a bit of the outside world in. It’s about showing off your expanding cultural life, letting people know that you’re broadening your horizons outside the home.”
Perhaps this will give your teen a little food for thought. It may even elevate their squalor to the realms of modern art. But art or no art, if they don’t bring their dirty mugs downstairs, they’re still not getting any pocket money.
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