Toward a New Appreciation of Craft

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water House 1937

The American Arts and Crafts movement produced some of the most beautiful objects and architecture in American history, but it didn’t last very long. Wedged into the space of a decade or so in between the Art Nouveau and Art Deco periods in art and architecture, the Arts and Crafts movement in the U.S. was a tiny oasis of progressive thought and art floating in a vast expanse of Horatio Algier junk mythology.

In the world of art, even the most beautiful craft is usually considered a bit tacky, a bit declasse. In the world of craft, art is considered snooty, wasteful, and self-indulgent. The Arts and Crafts movement attempted to make the utilitarian the beautiful—to make craft and art friends instead of class enemies—to bridge the gap between rich and poor by means of beauty and practical expertise. 

This was a dramatic departure from the contemporary leftist stereotype of the harsh people’s commune where everyone wears brown clothing and owns one spoon… OK, the community owns the spoon. Everyone GETS one spoon. And it’s an ugly spoon.

William Morris textileThe Arts and Crafts movement said, no, let’s have one spoon, yes—that’s all we really need—but let’s make it the perfect spoon—the most elegant, most pristine, most Zen-like handcrafted spoon that ever was. Let’s elevate spoons to the same level as angels. Let’s make a spoon that is so beautiful, so functional, and so naturally alive that even God would love to eat his ice cream with it.

It seems to me that we could use a Craftsman aesthetic today—an idea of the beautiful that is welded to nature and that hands humanity the responsibility for producing craft that is also art. We need to reverse the ‘add-profit-screw-value’ philosophy that has dominated corporate commerce for the past 30 years and create an ‘add-value-and-profit-will-follow’ model in its place.

Such an aesthetic would make craft noble again, would make working with one’s hands and heart into the virtue that it is instead of the lost cause we’ve allowed it to become.

If we could so much as elevate craft to craft that in itself would be a huge leap forward. Craft as art might well follow, but if we could at least begin by making things that do what they are made to do, services that provide something, words that have actual meaning, that would be a big deal and a vast improvement.

We have become a culture that is literally drowning in cheap crap. Cheap plastic crap from China, cheap construction that fails in less than a decade (but we tear it down before then anyway), ugly store facades, internet ‘content’ that makes no sense, crappy infrastructure, can openers that don’t even work the first time you try them out, clothes made in Sri Lanka that never fit anyone correctly, and shoes that don’t last a season. Since the crash, we can neither make this cheap crap competitively nor afford to buy it anymore.

So why try?

Let’s start over. Let’s vote out money, and vote in truth and beauty.

Truth is beauty and beauty truth: I’ve heard that anyway, somewhere, a million years ago or so.

In the end, that really is all we know of life and all we need to know.



Comments

[Eye On Life Team]

You are so right on about this. I want to make the most beautiful and truthful spoon in the world. ~Michelle