So much of modern American life seems to be a struggle against ambivalence, and having too many design choices doesn't help: "I like this couch, a lot! Oh wait -- maybe I like this one better. No, this one is the best. Forget it -- I hate all of them." It's little wonder that a magazine like Domino could so easily squeeze into the cracks of our uncertainty. Instead of fostering an appreciation of things that are beautiful, functional and all-around pleasing, Domino keeps us whirring in a constant state of doubt: If you're going to show me a console table, you had better make damned sure you show me a mirror to go with it, because I'm not entirely sure I need a console table in the first place, so having to choose a mirror, too, is likely to push me over the edge. That's not shopping -- it's hostage-taking.

There's a lot to look at in Domino, and yet not a lot to see. Every designer knows that the eye doesn't just see -- it also has a way of thinking, and it's completely capable of falling in love. The tried-and-true way of deciding what we like and don't like, in terms of design, has been to spend time looking. Does Scandinavian modern look cold and uninviting to you, or does it warm your soul? Do the curves and tendrils of art nouveau soothe you, or make you crazy? If you don't already know what you like, the chopped-and-diced world of Domino -- where the advertising is usually indistinguishable from the editorial features -- isn't the place to figure it out. There's no peace and quiet there; your eye can't hear itself think.

That's particularly interesting given that before former Condé Nast editorial director James Truman left his post, last January, he'd had an idea for a fine-arts magazine: The proposal was nixed by his boss, Si Newhouse. "I needed to be engaged in something that was meaningful and would excite me," Truman said in a February interview with the (U.K.) Independent. In the interview, Truman was unapologetic about the whorish nature of the shopping magazines -- Lucky, Cargo and Domino -- that were his brainchildren: "They have a kind of punk-rock quality of rebellion to them," he said, "and I felt they were a truthful reflection of what was going on in the culture. Everything is for sale. There is no point in pretending otherwise." But the shopping magazines Truman helped build aren't a "meaningful reflection" on consumerism; they're riding consumerism all the way to the bank. He's fooling himself when he calls them punk; they're more like art rock masquerading as art.

And while Domino pretends to offer its readers the personal touch, purporting to have an informed, friendly point of view on what's cool and interesting, its editorial voice is numbingly unoriginal. Domino makes the buying of things seem like a mere diversion rather than a way of exercising our own creativity. A month ago in the New York Times House and Home section, "Cad" author Rick Marin wrote a piece about buying a chandelier for his newly redecorated digs. Marin gave away bits of the reasoning behind wanting a chandelier in the first place: He was making a switch from his "historically severe minimalist bachelor digs" to a "feminized family abode." It wasn't necessarily a great piece of writing ("As Dr. Seuss might have written, if he'd done a book on decorating, the pad was going from cad to dad"), but unlike anything in the first issue of Domino, it got to the heart of the idea that sometimes a thing is more than just a thing. Some objects are beautiful, some are useful, some are both and some are neither. But Domino's police lineups of manufactured goods to the contrary, there's no one dictatorial voice that can help you decide what an object is worth, visually or otherwise. Objects aren't interesting in and of themselves: Our subjective responses to them are what make them so.

Sometimes we don't know why we want the things we do, or why certain things appeal to us so strongly. But inanimate objects can and do speak to us, and not just to say "Buy me!" When I look up from my writing table, the first objects I see are a black-ocean globe from the '50s (picked up at a flea market for $15); a circa-1930s Nick-and-Nora style cocktail cabinet; and a wooden cigarette box that, at the push of a button, plays "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" as a carved wooden dog rises from a secret panel in the back (his job is to proffer a cigarette, in this case, a chocolate one). My husband and I have had these things for years now, and I've looked at them thousands of times, so many times that I don't always actually see them. But their visual language is always a part of the room: The cocktail cabinet and cigarette holder harbor secrets of old-style glamour and whimsy; the globe, its land masses a patchwork of muted golds, pinks and blues against the blackness of the world's oceans and seas, is a mix of color and noncolor that I just love. All of us live with things like that, things that have been chosen with care and love. Occasionally, some of those things might have gotten our attention by shouting at us from a magazine page -- but even then, wasn't it the object, and not the shouting, that we responded to? Throwing hundreds of pictures at us in a crazily cluttered format, as the shopping magazines do, doesn't begin to explain why inanimate objects speak to us. Sometimes 1,000 words are worth more than a picture.

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