In the making

It was the desire to improve both aesthetic standards and working conditions that generated a further article of faith shared by many active within the Arts and Crafts movement: the belief that the material and moral fabric of society had been infinitely better sometime in the past, be it in the England of the Middle Ages or the America of the pioneer age. The ethos of industrial capitalism demanded production for profit rather than need and had generated shoddily designed goods in the process at the expense of both their aesthetic appeal to consumers and the well-being of the workforce. These miserable conditions were in stark contrast to those of a pre-industrialized past in which, it was generally believed, production took place under far more wholesome conditions. The crafts of medieval society had none of the "engine-turned precision" of modern industry, but they retained the sense of humanity that [John] Ruskin so admired. Writing on "The Nature of the Gothic" in the second volume of The Stones of Venice, published in 1853, Ruskin insisted that: "You must either make a tool of the creature or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them."

(from The Arts and Crafts Movement by Steven Adams, 1996)

The more things change, the more they stay the same? We might not face exactly the same conditions as in the mid nineteenth century. But the process that Ruskin decried, wherein the industrialist's technological measurement becomes the standard for all activity, hasn't left us. 

The Arts and Crafts Movement itself is intriguing. In a way it was backward looking. Of course. If you're looking for ideals and ideas, you have to examine the past at least a little. You can't look exclusively at the future, because the future isn't here yet and hasn't revealed its intentions. 

Talking tech talk

Information of the kind that purportedly wants to be free is nothing but a shadow of our own minds, and want nothing on its own. It will not suffer if it doesn't get what it wants.

But if you want to make the transition from the old religion, where you hope God will give you an afterlife, to the new religion, where you hope to become immortal by getting uploaded into a computer, then you have to believe information is real and alive. So for you, it will be important to redesign human institutions like art, the economy, and law to reinforce the perception that information is alive. You demand that the rest of us live in your conception of a state religion. You need us to deify information to reinforce your faith.

One of the books I'm currently reading is You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier. Lanier is sharply critical of current trends in thinking about computers and information. Because he's an innovator in virtual reality, it's hard to dismiss him as a Luddite crank. Oh, I'm sure some do, but on the web you'll also find people insisting that Obama was born in Kenya to Elijah Muhammed and Chairman Mao. While I'm still in early chapters he seems to be making the point that you can do wonderful things on a computer, and also do wonderful things offf of it, but in each case you as a person have to make the choice to do it. While a lot of techno-libertarianism seems to amount to a hope that machines will make better choices for us than we make for ourselves.

Someone I've been reading about recently is Donald Deskey, an industrial designer from Minnesota. Industrial design is an interesting topic in that it shares some concerns with art, but takes place outside of the art world and is presented to people who may not consciously be looking for an aesthetic. And Deskey, along with other designers like Paul Frankl, Raymond Loewy, and Norman Bel Geddes, helped to make things look the way they did through much of the 20th century. Exammples of his work can be seen here and here, and yes that second page include the "target" box for Tide detergent. He and the others created the environments you remember from old movies and TV shows, and maybe your childhood as well.

Now we're not necessarily talking about deep thinkers here. Deskey, Loewy et al essentially took a look at what the Bauhaus was doing and stripped the Marxism from it so that golf cart riding executives would pony up for it. But it's a humanistic kind of aesthetic all the same. They were invested in the idea of the future as something that ordinary people would live in. We should expect no less now.