Is This Pottery Barn Oversized Jumbo Paint Brush and Palette Wall Decor Available?
ISO: cringe plurality
Welcome to Is This Available? by Dana and Maria, our weekly blast about something we find on Facebook Marketplace.
Brooklyn, New York
I saved this listing about 4 days ago and I wasn’t exactly sure why. It’s corny as hell and the listing spelled the word “palette” wrong.
But then it hit me. It reminded me of DoodleBob. For those who don’t know, DoodleBob is the monster to SpongeBob Squarepants’s accidental Frankenstein behavior. SpongeBob brings DoodleBob to life by sketching him out with a comically large pencil. He’s debatably nonverbal – unless his catchphrase “me hoy minoy” is a secret language us landlubbers are too daft to decipher. Link here if you aren’t familiar. Shout out to my twin brother who can definitely tell you more lore on this than I can – one of his many gifts is an absolutely encyclopedic knowledge of SpongeBob’s storied 25 years and a damn good DoodleBob impression.
The motif is uncanny. And yet DoodleBob’s essence is so antithetical to the vibe that one who might drop a few hundred bucks on this Pottery Barn arts + crafts signifier yearns for. DoodleBob is chaotic and violent and objectively annoying as hell. One might even say ~cringe~.
And actually I think the cringe is a point where this palette and brush intersects with DoodleBob, but it’s a cringe of a different variety. Sure, watercoloring is epic, and something I’ve dabbled in. It’s soothing and portable and meditative and I can make my mom a pretty nice birthday card. But when it comes to hanging a very literal signifier of this pastime on the wall, I cringe.
The loudness of needing to have a literal depiction of an art tool on your wall to broadcast that you like Art is cringe. Buying “Art” at Pottery Barn is cringe. The vision of drilling those oversized hooks in the wall gives me nausea. There’s no nuance but also no goofiness inherent in a piece that should be part of some really ridiculous bit?
This is like something I would put on the walls of my Sim’s house and make them stare at to “get inspired” or whatever and it makes me both fear and revere it. I also think it’s something that I kind of could get wanting as a child because it’s rainbow and just makes sense when you’re eight years old. But this lister says it could also be perfect for “an art studio” and that sent shivers down my spine. Yer twisted!!
I would take a deep fried SpongeBob meme over this piece any day. I would take DoodleBob yammering in my ear and erasing my whole life. It might be thrilling and at the very least I’d be embracing the absurd with my whole chest.
And I guess sometimes we can never know if a piece of cringe, mildly cursed art is for adults or children anyway. It finds who it finds (despite the rumors that SpongeBob was created by a bunch of stoners who initially pitched to Adult Swim and then tapered down their innuendoes for Nickelodeon). And if you’re me, the cringe will find you <3.
Dana’s miss of the week: From what I remember DoodleBob lives in here, the $100 “Beautiful, broken buffet”
Need that so bad...