Life's Pleasures Quote by Peter De Vries

De Vries lands the joke with the deadpan precision of someone who knows that taste is a social performance as much as a sensory one. “The murals in restaurants” and “the food in museums” are both supposed to be atmosphere-enhancers, tokens of culture that lend credibility to the experience. His punchline is that they’re equally dispensable and equally mediocre: restaurant art is usually just wallpaper with aspirations, while museum food is nourishment with no ambitions beyond keeping you upright until the gift shop.

The line works because it swaps expectations across two spaces that trade on prestige. Restaurants sell authenticity, often staging it visually: faux frescoes, Tuscan vistas, anything that says you’re not merely eating; you’re participating in a curated lifestyle. Museums sell seriousness, but their cafes tend to feel like afterthoughts, as if appetite were an embarrassment that must be managed quietly, on a tray, under fluorescent light. De Vries’s comparison needles both institutions for using “culture” as a prop while outsourcing the craft.

There’s also a sly class critique. Both the restaurant mural and the museum sandwich are middlebrow compromises: accessible, safe, and designed not to offend. In the mid-century America De Vries inhabited, culture was increasingly packaged for consumption, literally and figuratively. His quip isn’t just snobbery; it’s a warning about how easily aesthetics become décor and how quickly experiences get flattened into pleasant, expensive blandness. The sentence is a small masterpiece of symmetry, turning two compliments into one shared insult.