What to Do with a Wall That Refuses to Mean Anything

There’s a large white wall in my apartment and it’s starting to feel like a personal affront. Not decorating it feels like laziness; decorating it wrong feels worse. I’ve been sitting on a massive collection of images saved on FFFFOUND—hundreds of them, years of casual curation—and the obvious move is to print the best ones and put them up. But obvious moves have a way of becoming embarrassing.

The failure modes are very specific. Too many images and it looks like a teenager’s bedroom, a chaos of band cutouts and celebrity posters. Too curated and it looks like a gallery wall in a lifestyle magazine, the kind of thing people assemble to perform having taste rather than actually having it. The single large print feels safe but inert. The grid feels corporate. The casual scatter either works immediately or looks like you gave up halfway through.

What I actually want is something that looks considered but not labored—like the wall accreted naturally over time rather than being assembled in an afternoon. I don’t know if that’s achievable on purpose. Maybe the only walls that look like that are the ones that actually did accrete naturally, image by image, year by year, and the whole project of doing it intentionally is already compromised.

Still. The wall is there. It needs something. I’m taking suggestions.