Wallpaper

A curious consideration of how wallpaper lives in our homes, our streets, our devices, and more.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

We live with wallpaper not only indoors, but also in art, cinema, fashion, video games, and in our desktops and smart phones. A papered wall can represent a kind of unrelenting screen time, an inescapable ambience that plays on our minds. Paper, plastic, or pixels, wallpaper always exceeds the medium in which it expresses itself. Its materials, colors, dimensions, and motifs have been characterized over the centuries as nurturing and edifying or harmful and even deadly.

Wallpaper is divided into two halves: the first half looks at conventional interior wallpaper and its influence on us, including its role in parenting and its impact on mental and physical health. The second half moves into other spaces: city streets, where swaths of posters and street art become urban wallpaper; museums, where fine art elevates wallpaper’s status; the runway, where wallpaper meets couture; and the digital realm, where wallpaper decorates computer screens and videogame environments. Wallpaper peels back the layers of a pervasive medium designed to fade into the background.