The culture of shoddy work and shoddy workmanship
Spanish public television, La 1, has launched an interior design competition that celebrates shoddy work and precariousness as creative solutions. This couldn't be more fitting in a country where the housing crisis is a major social concern and a politically unresolved issue. Decomasters It's a reform program in the style of MasterChef But in a DIY version. Ten pairs of contestants, chosen to guarantee the absurdity, cooperate and compete to decorate the homes of anonymous volunteers. We hope these people receive compensation for the disasters the celebrities perpetrate in their homes, because the aesthetic result is enough to make you want to gouge your eyes out.
He reality This renovation glorifies tackiness and makeshift solutions, and makes a case for bad taste. It reinforces a lifestyle based on maximizing aspirations and minimizing expenditures, with decorations made from materials more suited to an elementary school arts and crafts class. It also perpetuates the tradition of the incompetent, untrained worker who dares to undertake elaborate and grandiose projects because everything seems easy to them. They think they can transform a terrace in Villanueva de La Cañada into an exotic Balinese club with a plastic umbrella and an artificial grass carpet. The naive owners even request an outdoor cocktail bar. The result ends up looking like an enclosure for the family cats to play and urinate on.
Decomasters It's the show where contestants can transform a preschooler's bedroom into a psychedelic Alice in Wonderland nightmare. They can also paint a charming, bright loft in the colors of a fast-food ball pit.
The format reinforces the contemporary narrative that "with a few bucks and a good attitude, anything is possible," creating the fantasy of transforming precariousness into apparent luxury. On the one hand, the program uses the morbid strategy of selling tackiness and shoddy workmanship as a triumph. Rather than democratizing design, they destroy it. We are witnessing substandard decoration. Poorly applied paint, badly hung wallpaper, stylistic mixes, and work against the clock. Horror is mistaken for creativity.
On the other hand, it uses the deception of temporality, pretending to transform an entire home in just a few hours. It trivializes real working time and normalizes the idea that the space you live in is merely a facade of life—a temporary, easily interchangeable, disposable space. Home ceases to be a comfortable and continuous place, becoming instead a temporary stage set associated with frequent moves and increasingly fragile rights. It's a "do it yourself, quick and bad" approach that fits with a housing model lacking roots and guarantees.
