TV Eye

I am not going to write about Tiger Woods (okay, maybe just a little). I'm not going to write about that couple that snuck into the White House state dinner except to say one thing: Yikes! I am not going to write about the Octomom (do people still write about her?) or Kate and Jon Gosselin or any other person who, by virtue of doing something outrageous, stupid, or revolting, has become a celebrity. No, I'm going to write about Rotating Kitchen by Zeger Reyers. I just learned about it this week, thanks to Facebook. Reyers is an artist from the Netherlands who recently launched his art installation Rotating Kitchen at the "Eating the Universe" exhibit at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. Among other sites, you can view his installation in its entirety here: www.vimeo.com/7887463.

For those of you not at a computer, let me explain what you would see.

Reyers designed a life-sized kitchen scene inside a large box, open on one side. The kitchen is fully appointed (less major appliances, from what I can see). The cabinets and drawers are filled with kitchen supplies; the counters have the bric-a-brac you'd find on any kitchen counter; there's a fluted, operational swag lamp that hangs over the entire scene. The box is displayed in the corner of the gallery, rigged up on a machine to make the box turn. That's right. Someone flips a switch, and the box makes an entire, 360-degree turn so that halfway through, the floor is now the ceiling. The rotation occurs incrementally, and the whole thing takes place in about 12 minutes. As you might expect, glasses and plates and utensils fall out of cabinets and break; fruit rolls off the counter and bounces away; cabinets and drawers yawn open, and their contents splatter to the surface beneath them. I love the Internet. How else would I have seen this event, half a world away?

Now I'm sure the experience would have been much different had I been among the assembled onlookers watching this organized disaster at floor level, but as I watched on my computer, on my lap, I was intrigued, amused, and annoyed – all at once and not in that order. In other words, I had a "eureka" moment.

I was having a hard time understanding why Tiger Woods' apparent marital problems were news. Of course, it didn't start that way. I first heard of his car accident on the radio, and as the tale progressed and it became clear that it was a domestic dispute, the only thing I could think was: Here we go again with the schadenfreude show, in which the world at large takes pleasure in a famous person's pain/downfall/foibles/stupidass mistake. The bigger the celebrity, the larger the pleasure, it seems. If Tiger Woods were not such a genial-seeming guy, you can bet the chatter about this would be much more snarky. As it is, his domestic problems are played for laughs (Saturday Night Live did a skit about it last week). I wonder how funny it would be had Woods been the one found with a golf club in hand, standing over his wife sprawled in the street after she hit a fire hydrant?

My first thought when I was watching Rotating Kitchen was that it was the upper-middle-class version of stock-car racing. Just switch out the corn dogs and beer with wine and cheese, and you're good to go. Comments about the video at Vimeo.com were mostly complimentary, with a perplexed "Why?" thrown in there a couple of times and a few self-serving questions about funding. But most of the comments called Rotating Kitchen beautiful, amazing, and brilliant. There is something mesmerizing about the sound of breaking glass and watching a microcosm of the world – in this case, the most domestic room of most people's lives – tipped and toppled and ultimately destroyed. It's especially engrossing if it's not your world and you can watch from a safe distance with a nice Shiraz in hand.

So now I get it.

When it comes right down to it, people like to see how stuff gets messed up.

My only lingering question is: Who gets to clean it up?

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