"...hand-built furniture no longer stands a chance in the dogfight of the open marketplace. Sensing extinction, the craft seeks shelter—from the street by selling itself—as art." — Glenn Gordon.
"For craftsmen beauty and function outweighed artistic concerns, and now, thank god, art outweighs beauty and function." — Veronica Pasfield.
"She possessed, too, that real sense of beauty which has far less to do with art than with the constant readiness to discern a halo round a frying pan." — Vladimir Nabokov.
It may seem redundant and strange and unnecessary to defend a quality that is universally assumed a virtue —beauty. But the ubiquitous visual assaults on beauty, along with the overtly stated ones, have driven me to the undebated debate. I do not believe that all qualities of things, most particularly beauty, should be subservient to that slippery concept "Art" —capital "A" art, that is. (Small "a" art is anything thoughtfully conceived and done so well that it becomes beautiful —that it elicits the sympathetic emotional response to something called beauty, and this can be in the form of a table, a song, a building, a painting, or any other performance.)
"Beauty is its own excuse for being." — R.W. Emerson.
The item that took me over the edge was an article in the Detroit Monthly, where art critic Veronica Pasfield "thanks God" that in the work of contemporary postmodern crafters, "Art outweighs beauty and function." It had never occurred to me in my obtuseness to weigh beauty against Art. In fact, for years I had not only entangled the two but (dare I admit it) occasionally equated them. I am now enlightened sufficiently to realize that Art may have beauty or it may not. Having been superceded by the higher function of Art, beauty is liable to detract from Art. The more the object strays from earthly function and the less beautiful it is (as implied by Pasfield) the more it ascends to the heady realms of Art. For beauty is only emotion, but Art is given the license to tug at the skirts of thought.
"To find God (beauty) with the intellect is like eating soup with a fork." — Sister Karen Armstrong.
It was not enough to split art and craft, meaning and utility, from its essential unity centuries ago, but now we must subvert craft entirely to be at the service of Art —the kind of art as defined by Oscar Wilde in the phrase "All art is useless," as meant by Marshall McLuhan, "Art is whatever you can get away with," sprinkled with a bit of Sylvia Plath, "Art is not pleasing your mother." Since Wilde's Art is made up of objects of no utility, they need not be beautiful to transcend the craft that informed them, so long, I presume, as they seem to have meaning. Otherwise, they remain in the realm of purposeless craft —a just possibly admirable display of skill.
Objects of utility, on the other hand, must of necessity be beautiful if they are to transcend the craft that formed them. Craft has no other straw to grab to lift itself out of the confines of mere skill. The crafter of useful things cannot depend on seeming beauty (for beauty isn't seeming; it exists for the viewer or it doesn't), as can the artist depend on the vagaries of seeming meaning. The utilitarian can't fudge. It gives me gloating comfort to infer from this that the crafter of utility has the greater challenge vis-à-vis the crafter of Art. The need to speak up for craft, for utility, beauty, and small "a" art does seem strange. All were at one time rolled into an historic singularity, a prime means of expression, beginning as far back as flint spearpoints, where the extra effort expended to made them handsome is readily apparent, as the anthropologist Loren Eisely has pointed out.
"In nature, function and beauty are one, and this remains the unattainable ideal of human creativeness." — Edgar Kaufman.
The Inuit decorate their harpoons out of respect for and to propitiate the spirit of the hunt; so too do we crafters give extra thought and care to our objects out of respect for the spirit of their purpose and perhaps even to propitiate the spirit of beauty, which is our hunt. I recall needing a trench dug from well to house and left the job in the hands of a casual worker to return to find an impressively straight square-sided flat-bottomed ditch that was a joy to behold. The pipes didn't care, but he did.
"The human value of anything is determined by the coincidence in it of beauty and utility, significance and aptitude." — Ananda K. Coomeraswami.
It has been recently said that, at least in the USA, the making of useful objects by small shop crafters is no longer viable and that only the inhabitants of Asia or machines can fill the need for makers. This is deemed true because both can spew things out at low cost and in great quantity. But spirit and beauty will not ride with the objects all the way to Wal-Mart, for machines and unconcerned labor, in the process of making, wipe the product clean of any vibrato of beauty and warmth.
Machines and workers uninvolved with the product produce sterile goods in great quantity but without heart. This leaves a great void that cries to be filled with beauty. That's the crafters job.
My heroes, Eames, Bertoia, Saarinen (wood, metal, plastic) made as close to Plato's ideal chair as one can get, but like all ideas, these conceptions lack the hand. They remain shadows. They have become Art objects to be viewed and not used. In the stamped-out product there is no room for serendipity, no room for Soetsu Yanagi's imperfections, which allows the ultimate beauty.
"Machine made at cost of the heart, warmth, friendliness, and beauty. Machine made are children of the brain." — Soetsu Yanagi.
I fervently hope, and I believe, that crafted utilitarian objects are here to stay and that small shops will survive to continue to fill the need to express beauty and to enable the public to receive beauty. As long as beauty is appreciated, the making of well crafted useful objects will remain a viable enterprise for those with the inborn need to make, the energy to do it, and a bit of talent to top it off. John Dewey's observation of a previous time that "everything useful was beautiful because it bore the imprint of man's hand working lovingly on an object that was needed" need not become a quaint homily but can be a call for meaning and beauty and small "a" art.
It is beauty that elicits oh wows. No matter how the message gets to the brain —by eye, ear, taste, touch —there is an emotional response to patterns that please, and there is in man a need to make those patterns. The definition of a crafter is one who strives for beauty in the mundane. All of the above is just to indicate that if an ancient and honorable profession is to be pulled up by its utilitarian roots by being pulled down by a grinding market and callous public, I am going to be dragging my feet all the way.
"Without beauty there is little fun and less humor." — James Hillman.
