Chances are the insides of your house and my house look pretty similar. Know how I know? I saw you at IKEA last weekend.

This isn’t to say that I’m disappointed with your lack of originality – even though you ended up buying and self-assembling the same Torekov sofa I bought two months ago. IKEA is a really neat place. Everything inside is so utilitarian-cool, like someone from the near future built all this stuff for us present dwellers. Really, it’s OK if you like IKEA. I like it too.

Once this college indebtedness problem is fixed, I’ll fill my apartment with IKEA brand minimalist furnishings. Everything will be square-shaped and be a cool Zen mix of black and white. I’ll have a couple of the paper lantern towers sitting in the corner, and I’ll buy an inordinate number of desk lamps for no reason (Have you seen the TV spot with the non-IKEA lamp sitting out in the rain? www.adswatcher.com/media/tv/ikea-lamp. Absolutely heart wrenching.).

The last time I was at IKEA, I happened to wander into the picture frame department. There, an array of frames dazzled me with their super modern designs. And inside each frame, the sample photos showed idyllic scenes of sun-parted clouds and water droplets on flower petals. A number of them bore striking resemblance to Microsoft sample desktop wallpapers.

In another aisle, large pieces of framed art stacked several feet high depicted similar peaceful scenes. A soirée of pebbles in blue earth tones. A close-up of a zebra’s right flank. An artful black-and-white of the Eiffel Tower rising into the sky.

Entranced by the picturesque-ness of the picture frames at IKEA, I felt compelled to take them home with me.

You know the kind of pictures I’m talking about. My older, hip cousins have these types of pictures hanging proudly on their walls as if they were world-traveling amateur photographers. These scenes of natural beauty and of innocent girls blowing bubbles into fresh spring air are the kinds of contemporary art that are hard to dislike.

They’re such perfect moments caught in the photographer’s lens that the scenes are surreally beautiful, like snapshots of the real world taken out of context and then improved.

And so we buy these photos sensing that we identify with the generic bubble-blowing girl. And then we buy expensive digital cameras with more pixels than rationally necessary in the hopes of catching ourselves and our friends in similar candid moments. Of course, you and I know nothing about proper lighting, or contrasts, or saturations, so when it comes time to print out the photos at Wal-Mart, they just come out plain old, bland pictures of real life. How disappointing.

It is ironic that so few of the hanging photos in my house are actually occupied by the people in my life. Instead, the IKEA-cool frames carry their mass-produced works of photo art. Meanwhile, shots from family portraits, Hawaiian vacations and second-prize science fairs stay neatly tucked away in dusty picture albums and in digital storage bins.

In the melodramatic climax of the archetypal teen summer-camp movie, the home-sick protagonist looks to her cherished pictures of friends and family for support. She is reinvigorated by their smiles behind glass picture frames and rises to the occasion to thwart evil/become popular/etcetera.

In real life, this sort of hackneyed inspiration is no longer possible. Instead, we sit and cry hot tears until we find inspiration in the close-up shot of the feathers on a quill pen or the soothing ripples of water on a still pond. The framed photographs of our lives come from the scrapbook of a commercial photographer.

This is a new age for buyers of art. No longer bound by the elitism of Van Goghs and Goyas, we can now proudly house our own works of art for the price of $19.99 from IKEA.

But really, there’s no point in pretending like you’ve got valuable art on your walls. When asked, just be cool and in your best British accent say, “What, this old thing? It’s an IKEA.”

Henry is a freshman in Business. You can reach him via e-mail, but it might be faster just to drive to the nearest IKEA to find him marveling at the pictures in the frames.