apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

On the one hand, I think it's cool seeing a toile with updated scenes...

...but on the other hand, I'm wondering if there aren't more than a couple stereotypes depicted here - such as the guy in the puffy jacket and thick eyeglasses, the (homeless?) dude sleeping on the park bench w/ a beer can on the ground, or the piles of wooden palletes?

I wonder how we'd feel seeing a "Suburbia" themed toile - perhaps with rows of identical McMansions, SUV's lining the curbs at the school, kids playing video-games and Soccer-Moms pushing oversized strollers through the mall while talking on cell-phones and drinking a Starbucks Latte?

Eerily reminiscent of the "Harlem Toile" that caused such an uproar a little while back, if you ask me. *Sigh*. This idea has been done, and was executed in a much more exciting manner (politically and artistically) than this particular "Chinatown" example.

Here is the Harlem toile by Sheila Bridges that's mentioned above. A similar idea of the Glasgow toile by Timorous Beasties. Personally, I think all of these contemporary toiles are interesting -- depicting cliche scenes is sort of what this genre has been about. Look at historic examples of pastoral scenes in old toiles and tell me that they're not, in some ways, cliche and perhaps offensive.

And then there's
http://www.towntoiles.com/
They have fabric, wallpaper, and lots of other fun things.