Response to Dysfunctional Craft
Isn’t the traditional purpose of craftsmanship is to provide the best possible function, durability, etc, without revealing the hand of the craftsman or the infrastructure of manufacture? As mechanical inventions of man supplanted or distanced the direct physical manipulation the economic factor of replaced workers resulted in the class-based reactionary Luddites. Today you have the current China price due to imperialist actions of conglomerate manufacturers and thus are witnessing a similar revolt in the form of the bourgeois DIY movement and the soon-to-be fully co-opted and incorporated “organic” and “green” consumption trends.
So, when one espouses the Marxist notion of all things being reduced to capital, I can’t argue with that. What I do question is the primacy of capital over emotion in the cost-value analysis of items for consumption. On a similar vein, the low retention rate in the crafts-artisan field, I would argue, remains the same across the board no matter the major. I certainly know plenty of English and Philosophy majors who work their share of McJobs. Certainly the decimation of the public funding of the arts would play some small part in such an American travesty.
Regarding the question of the death of “craft,” I would propose the sublimation a necessity for basic survival. As the modernist project failed to distill each subdivision into an essence and return the overly-specialized parts into some form of larger truth, I would propose that within the Culture War – specifically the War on the NEA – the divided Arts are facing the real threat of annihilation and those surviving on the poisoned breast of privatization and the wizened teat of evil big government have no choice but to regroup, strategorize and attack. Hopefully these are the seeds of a new front.
Personally my view of craft is supplementary, simply the optimization of the stated function of the object or creation. Moreover, I would suggest that it is not craft itself that has changed, but the function of craft, specifically the ends one seeks to achieve using craft as much as form.
Industrialization aside, the strata of the standard of living and the perceptions of class have remained constant and have thus always informed the public consciousness of consumption; therefore, when it is proposed that one must manufacture or starve I cringe. Oppositional thought patterns rarely find solutions, so I must implore a European path that requires public funding, namely educational and political solutions to educational and political problems. We certainly wouldn’t be where we are today without the GI bill.
I do enjoy the equivalence of the lone maker with the likes of Target. Should they both be using Chinese children or prison labor? I certainly think so, but for different reasons. Without a “personal vision,” wouldn’t you be making something that’s already been made? Wouldn’t innovation require a fresh set of eyes with which one reformulates given components? Wouldn’t those eyes have some history of their own from which they would pull, since they may have been born at night, but not last night?
Long Live the Dead Crafts.
Captain Ludd "The Gouger"
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
I'm a student in the Jewelry and Metals program at Towson University. It is my intent to enter the field professionally after graduation.
That being said, I would utterly dismantle the NEA if it were my choice. The "poison" of privatization keeps the arts honest. The NEA is an appointed body. As such, it does not answer to the public via election. This tends to lead to it funding art that no one else has enough interest in to pay for.
If no one in the public cares enough about a mode or medium or specific piece of art enough to pay for it, then it should die. It's time has come.
If this reasoning leads to the death of whatever profession I choose, then so be it. I will be sad, but at least I'll know that my new profession is something that people care about.
Oh yeah, I found this via a link on Conceptual Metalsmithing.
My problem, Taylor, with your assessment, is that the public is not wise.
The public is reactionary, and more often driven by fear than curiosity. If we allowed everything the public was disinterested in to die, we would still think the earth was flat.
Government as a whole is not necessarily much wiser, expect that hopefully we have placed individuals in government who are curious, and who will allow new ideas the time they need to develop. We cannot know where a line of speculative research may lead.
And it will truly be a sad day when we no longer believe that our culture, as well as our money, should be growing.
-Corey
I'd just like to thank you both for your enthusiastic and insightful responses.
Whether you are motivated by self-gratification or outside validation is what finding your career is all about.
Regarding the NEA, it is already dead, dismantled, defunded because of its choices in what it funded. My point was that there were consequences to challenging the status quo, and we have seen them.
On Innovation
Regarding public funding versus private funding, I second Cory’s notion that art is like science. Is there more profit to be found in treatment or cures? Preventing hair loss or breast cancer? Likewise in art would there be more public support for a pretty picture of our leader or an ugly picture of the sorry state of our VA hospitals? Taking Einstein’s wacko theories about matter and energy from the drawing board to the real world simply could not be a feasible risk for even a major multinational, but was very possible for the FDR version of big government.
What astronomical profits were to be found to counter the enormous cost of building the national highway system? Therefore, private rail/auto industry rightly allowed/pushed through federal funding/construction of that network just like it did with the internet (though I’m sure you’re aware of its invention by Al Gore, whereas I maintain it was an act of divine providence).
So if it is the utility of art that you are questioning and therefore its viability in a corporate-welfare free market, then I second your notion of its proper demise. However, it’s in the nation’s best interest to keep employment high. Education begets wealth, which in turn begets a wealthy nation. Education without the danger of creativity is automation without innovation. As a fellow art student I’m sure your best interest lies in pursuing the field of art and as we all know if everyone pursues their best interest then it is best for the whole (guided by the invisible hand, of course). Ergo it would be in the nation’s best interest to ensure each pursues their best interest.
I tend to worship the golden calf of the Market as much as the next guy, but I try to acknowledge that it has no popular place for muckrakers, journalists, protesters, dissenters, or artists except as sensationalist headliners or co-opted simulacra.
If I had the power, I would throw the moneychangers out of the schools. I’d make a whip of some cords and drive them out, as schools have become a den of thieves robbing the simple of their simplicity or supplanting fact for ad and personhood for personality.
Indeed the idea of the electability of artwork is a fertile field to explore within the artworld, but I bet there’s no mass market for it…yet.
Meanwhile, we dismantle our big government for an ideal beast starved and whipped by the holy corporations only to reap zero innovation and an industry vacuum that threatens our post-service economy.
---
However, I must differ with Cory on one point as I do believe we can buy our culture later on. That's what mid-life crisis is all about!
Yes, but to buy creativity at mid-life, someone else would have to make it.
;-)
-Corey
Post a Comment