We want to share with you an essay that we love, that was written - as Facundo Cabral said - by that light that is Octavio Paz. Octavio Paz (Mexico City, 1914-1998) was a great Mexican poet and essayist and one of the most influential Spanish-speaking poets. Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990 and Cervantes Prize in 1981, he published this essay in 1988 as a wonderful apology for traditional crafts and trades. We share it with you with the passages that we like the most highlighted. So that you can enjoy it as much as we do, on a rainy Saturday afternoon.
Craftsmanship, which is a physical presence that enters us through the senses and in which the principle of utility is continually broken for the benefit of tradition, fantasy and even whim (...) Craftsmanship does not conquer us solely for its usefulness . It lives in complicity with our senses and that is why it is so difficult to get rid of it. It's like throwing a friend out onto the street.
Well planted. Not fallen from above: emerged from below. Ocher, burnt honey color. Color of sun buried a thousand years ago and unearthed yesterday. Cool green and orange stripes cross his still warm body. Circles, fretwork: remains of a dispersed alphabet? Belly of an engorged woman, neck of a bird. If you cover and uncover its mouth with the palm of your hand, it answers you with a deep murmur, a gushing gush of water; If you hit his belly with the knuckles of your fingers, he lets out a laugh of little silver coins falling on the stones. They have many languages, they speak the language of mud and mineral, that of the air running between the walls of the ravine, that of the washerwomen while they wash, that of the sky when it gets angry, that of the rain. Sewn clay pot: do not put it in the rare objects display case. I would play a bad role. Its beauty is allied to the liquid it contains and the thirst it quenches. Her beauty is corporal: I see it, I touch it, I smell it, I hear it. If it is empty, it must be filled; If it is full, it must be emptied. I take her by the turned handle like a woman by the arm, I lift her up, I lean her over a jug into which I pour milk or pulque – mole liquid that opens and closes the doors of dawn and dusk, waking up and sleeping. It is not an object to contemplate but to drink.
Glass jug, wicker basket, cotton blanket huipil, wooden casserole: beautiful objects not in spite but thanks to their usefulness. Beauty comes as an added bonus, like the smell and color of flowers. Their beauty is inseparable from their function: they are beautiful because they are useful. Crafts belong to a world before the separation between the useful and the beautiful. This separation is more recent than one thinks: many of the objects that accumulate in our museums and private collections belonged to that world where beauty was not an isolated and self-sufficient value. Society was divided into two large territories, the profane and the sacred. In both, beauty was subordinated, in one case to utility and in the other to magical effectiveness. Utensil, talisman, symbol: beauty was the aura of the object, the consequence – almost always involuntary – of the secret relationship between its workmanship and its meaning. The workmanship: how a thing is made; the sense: what it is made for. Now all these objects, torn from their historical context, their specific function and their original meaning, offer themselves to our eyes as enigmatic divinities and demand our adoration. The transition from the cathedral, the palace, the nomad tent, the courtesan's boudoir and the sorcerer's cave to the museum was a magical-religious transmutation: the objects became icons. This idolatry began in the Renaissance and since the 18th century it has been one of the religions of the West (the other is politics). Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz already gracefully mocked, in the midst of the baroque age, aesthetic superstition: “a woman's hand,” she says, “is white and beautiful because it is made of flesh and blood, not ivory or silver; I appreciate it not because it looks but because it grabs.”
The fondness for disused machines and gadgets is not only further proof of the incurable nostalgia that man feels for the past but also reveals a fissure in modern sensibility: our inability to associate beauty and usefulness. Double condemnation: artistic religion prohibits us from considering what is useful beautiful; The cult of utility leads us to conceive beauty not as a presence but as a function.
The religion of art was born, like the religion of politics, from the ruins of Christianity. Art inherited from ancient religion the power to consecrate things and infuse them with a kind of eternity: museums are our temples and the objects exhibited in them are beyond history. Politics – more precisely: the Revolution – confiscated the other function of religion: changing man and society. Art was an asceticism, a spiritual heroism; The Revolution was the construction of a universal church. The artist's mission consisted of the transmutation of the object; that of the revolutionary leader in the transformation of human nature. Picasso and Stalin. The process has been twofold: in the sphere of politics, ideas became ideology and ideologies became idolatries; The art objects, in turn, became idols and the idols became ideas. We see works of art with the same contemplation – although with less benefit – with which the wise man of antiquity contemplated the starry sky: these paintings and sculptures are, like the celestial bodies, pure ideas. Artistic religion is a Neoplatonism that does not dare to confess its name – when it is not a holy war against infidels and heretics. The history of modern art can be divided into two currents: the contemplative and the combative. Trends such as cubism and abstract art belong to the first; to the second, movements such as futurism, dadaism and surrealism. The mysticism and the crusade.
The movement of the stars and planets was for the ancients the image of perfection: to see celestial harmony was to hear it and to hear it was to understand it. This religious and philosophical vision reappears in our conception of art. Pictures and sculptures are not, for us, beautiful or ugly things, innocent intellectual and sensitive things, spiritual realities, ways in which Ideas are manifested. Before the aesthetic revolution, the value of works of art was referred to another value. That value was the link between beauty and meaning: art objects were things that were sensitive forms that were signs. The meaning of a work was plural, but all its meanings were referred to an ultimate signifier, in which meaning and being were confused in an indissoluble knot: divinity. Modern transposition: for us the artistic object is an autonomous and self-sufficient reality and its ultimate meaning is not beyond the work, but in it itself. It is a meaning beyond – or more here – the meaning; I mean: it no longer has any reference. Like the Christian divinity, Pollock's paintings do not mean: they are.
The industrial object tends to disappear as a form and become confused with its function. Its being is its meaning and its meaning is to be useful. It is at the other end of the artwork. Craftsmanship is a mediation: its forms are not governed by the economy of function but by pleasure, which is always an expense and has no rules.
In modern works of art, meaning dissipates in the irradiation of being. The act of seeing is transformed into an intellectual operation that is also a magical rite: seeing is understanding and understanding is communion. Next to divinity and its believers, the theologians: art critics. His lucubrations are no less abstruse than those of the medieval scholastics and the Byzantine doctors, although they are less rigorous. The questions that fascinated Origen, Albertus Magnus, Abelard and Saint Thomas reappear in the disputes of our art critics, only disguised and trivialized. The similarity does not stop there: to the divinities and the theologians who explain them we must add the martyrs. In the 20th century we have seen the Soviet State persecute poets and artists with the same ferocity with which the Dominicans extirpated the Albigensian heresy.
It is natural that the ascension and sanctification of the work of art has provoked periodic rebellions and desecrations. Take the fetish out of its niche, deface it, walk it through the streets with donkey ears and tail, drag it on the ground, poke it and show that it is stuffed with sawdust, that it is nothing or nobody and that it means nothing - and then go back to it. enthrone him. The Dadaist Huelsenbeck said in a moment of exasperation: “art needs a good spanking.” He was right, except that the cardinals who left those lashes on the body of the Dadaist object were like the decorations on the chests of generals: they gave him more respectability. Our museums are full of anti-works of art and works of anti-art. More skillful than Rome, artistic religion has assimilated all schisms.
The industrial object does not tolerate the superfluous; craftsmanship delights in ornaments. His predilection for decoration is a transgression of utility. The ornaments of the artisanal object generally have no function and hence, obedient to their implacable aesthetics, the industrial designer suppresses them. The persistence and proliferation of ornament in crafts reveal an intermediary zone between utility and aesthetic contemplation. In crafts there is a continuous back-and-forth between usefulness and beauty; That back and forth has a name: pleasure.
I do not deny that contemplating three sardines on a plate or a triangle and a rectangle can enrich us spiritually; I affirm that the repetition of that act soon degenerates into a boring ritual. That is why the futurists, faced with cubist Neoplatonism, asked to return to the subject. The reaction was healthy and, at the same time, naive. More insightfully, the Surrealists insisted that the work of art should say something. Since reducing the work to its content or its message would have been foolish, they resorted to a notion that Freud had put into circulation: latent content. What the work of art says is not its manifest content but what it says without saying: what is behind the shapes, colors and words. It was a way of loosening, without completely untying it, the theological knot between being and meaning to preserve, as far as possible, the ambiguous relationship between both terms.
The most radical was Duchamp: the work passes through the senses, but does not stop at them. The work is not one thing: it is a range of signs that, by opening and closing, alternately lets us see and hides its meaning from us. The work of art is a sign of intelligence that exchanges meaning and meaninglessness. The danger of this attitude – a danger that Duchamp (almost) always escaped – is to fall on the other side and be left with the concept and without the art, with the trouvaille and without the thing. That is what has happened with his imitators. It must be added that, in addition, they are often left without the art and without the concept. It is hardly worth repeating that art is not a concept: art is a thing of the senses. More boring than the contemplation of still life is the speculation of the pseudo concept. Modern artistic religion turns on itself without finding the way out: it goes from the denial of meaning by the object to the denial of the object by meaning.
The artisanal object satisfies a need no less imperative than thirst and hunger: the need to recreate ourselves with the things we see and touch, whatever their daily uses. This need is not reducible to the mathematical ideal that governs industrial design nor to the rigor of artistic religion. The pleasure that craftsmanship gives us springs from a double transgression: the cult of utility and the religion of art.
The Industrial Revolution was the other side of the artistic revolution. The consecration of the work of art as a unique object corresponded to the increasing production of identical and increasingly perfect utensils. Like museums, our homes were filled with ingenious artifacts. Exact, helpful, silent and anonymous instruments. At first, aesthetic concerns hardly played a role in the production of useful objects. Or rather, those concerns produced results different from those imagined by the manufacturers. The ugliness of many objects from the prehistory of industrial design – an ugliness not without charm – is due to superposition: the “artistic” element, generally taken from the academic art of the time, is juxtaposed to the object itself. The result has not always been unfortunate and many of these objects – I am thinking of those from the Victorian era and also those of the modern style – belong to the same family as mermaids and sphinxes. A family ruled by what could be called the aesthetics of incongruity. In general, the evolution of the industrial object for daily use has followed that of artistic styles. It has almost always been a derivation – sometimes a caricature, other times a happy copy – of the artistic trend in vogue. Industrial design has lagged behind contemporary art and has imitated styles when they had already lost their initial novelty and were about to become aesthetic commonplaces.
Contemporary design has tried to find a compromise between utility and aesthetics in other ways – its own. Sometimes it has succeeded, but the result has been paradoxical. The aesthetic ideal of functional art consists of increasing the usefulness of the object in direct proportion to the decrease in its materiality. The simplification of the forms is translated into this formula: the maximum of performance corresponds to the minimum of presence. Aesthetics rather of a mathematical order: the elegance of an equation consists in its simplicity and the need for its solution. The ideal of design is invisibility: functional objects are all the more beautiful the less visible they are. Curious transposition of fairy tales and Arab legends to a world governed by science and the notions of usefulness and maximum performance: the designer dreams of objects that, like the genii, are intangible servants. The opposite of craftsmanship, which is a physical presence that enters our senses and in which the principle of usefulness is continually broken for the benefit of tradition, fantasy and even whim. The beauty of industrial design is conceptual: if it expresses anything, it is the correctness of a formula. It is the sign of a function. Its rationality locks it in an alternative: it serves or it does not serve. In the second case you have to throw it in the trash can. Craftsmanship does not conquer us only because of its usefulness. It lives in complicity with our senses and that is why it is so difficult to get rid of it. It's like throwing a friend out onto the street.
Made by hand, the artisanal object bears the fingerprints of the person who made it, really or metaphorically. Those prints are not the artist's signature, they are not a name; They are not a brand either. They are rather a sign: the almost erased scar that commemorates the original brotherhood of men. Made by the hands, the artisanal object is made for the hands: we can not only see it but we can feel it.
There is a moment in which the industrial object finally becomes a presence with aesthetic value: when it becomes useless. Then it becomes a symbol or an emblem. The locomotive that Whitman sings about is a machine that has stopped and that no longer transports passengers or goods in its cars: it is an immobile monument to speed. Whitman's disciples -Valéry Larbaud and the Italian Futurists- exalted the beauty of locomotives and railways just when other means of communication - the plane, the car - were beginning to displace them. The locomotives of these poets are equivalent to the artificial ruins of the 18th century: they are a complement to the landscape. The cult of machinery is a naturalism au rebours: utility that becomes useless beauty, an organ without function. Through the ruins, history is reintegrated into nature, whether we are facing the crumbling stones of Nineveh or a locomotive cemetery in Pennsylvania. The fondness for disused machines and gadgets is not only further proof of the incurable nostalgia that man feels for the past but also reveals a fissure in modern sensibility: our inability to associate beauty and usefulness. Double condemnation: artistic religion prohibits us from considering what is useful beautiful; The cult of utility leads us to conceive beauty not as a presence but as a function. Perhaps this is due to the extraordinary poverty of technology as a provider of myths: aviation fulfills an old dream that appears in all societies, but it has not created figures comparable to Icarus and Phaeton.
The industrial object tends to disappear as a form and become confused with its function. Its being is its meaning and its meaning is to be useful. It is at the other end of the work of art. Craftsmanship is a mediation: its forms are not governed by the economy of function but by pleasure, which is always an expense and has no rules. The industrial object does not tolerate the superfluous; craftsmanship delights in ornaments. His predilection for decoration is a transgression of utility. The ornaments of the artisanal object generally have no function and hence, obedient to their implacable aesthetics, the industrial designer suppresses them. The persistence and proliferation of ornament in crafts reveal an intermediary zone between utility and aesthetic contemplation. In crafts there is a continuous back-and-forth between usefulness and beauty; That back and forth has a name: pleasure. Things are pleasant because they are useful and beautiful. The copulative conjunction (and) defines craftsmanship as the disjunctive conjunction defines art and technique: utility or beauty. The handmade object satisfies a need to recreate ourselves with the things we see and touch, whatever their daily uses. This need is not reducible to the mathematical ideal that governs industrial design nor to the rigor of artistic religion. The pleasure that craftsmanship gives us springs from the double transgression: the cult of utility and the religion of art.
The jug of water or wine in the center of the table is a point of confluence, a small sun that unites the diners. But that jug that we all use to drink from, my wife can transform it into a vase. Personal sensitivity and fantasy divert the object from its function and interrupt its meaning: it is no longer a container used to store a liquid but to display a carnation. Deviation and interruption that connect the object with another region of sensitivity: the imagination.
Made by hand, the artisanal object bears the fingerprints of the person who made it, really or metaphorically. Those prints are not the artist's signature, they are not a name; They are not a brand either. They are rather a sign: the almost erased scar that commemorates the original brotherhood of men. Made by the hands, the artisanal object is made for the hands: we can not only see it but we can feel it. We see the work of art, but we do not touch it. The religious taboo that prohibits us from touching the saints – “you will burn your hands if you touch the Monstrance,” they told us when we were children – also applies to paintings and sculptures. Our relationship with the industrial object is functional; with the work of art, semi-religious; with craftsmanship, corporal. In truth it is not a relationship, but a contact. The transpersonal character of craftsmanship is expressed directly and immediately in sensation: the body is participation. To feel is, above all, to feel something or someone that is not us. Above all: feel with someone. Even to feel itself, the body seeks another body. We feel through others. The physical and bodily ties that unite us with others are no less strong than the legal, economic and religious ties. Craftsmanship is a sign that expresses society not as work (technique) nor as a symbol (art, religion) but as shared physical life.
The jug of water or wine in the center of the table is a point of confluence, a small sun that unites the diners. But that jug that we all use to drink from, my wife can transform it into a vase. Personal sensitivity and fantasy divert the object from its function and interrupt its meaning: it is no longer a container used to store a liquid but to display a carnation. Deviation and interruption that connect the object with another region of sensitivity: the imagination. This imagination is social: the carnation in the jug is also a metaphorical sun shared with everyone. In its perpetual oscillation between beauty and utility, pleasure and service, the artisanal object teaches us lessons in sociability. At parties and ceremonies its irradiation is even more intense and total. In the festival the community communes with itself and that communion is carried out through ritual objects that are almost always handmade works. If the festival is participation in original time – the community literally distributes among its members, like sacred bread, the date it commemorates – craftsmanship is a kind of festival of the object: it transforms the utensil into a sign of participation.
The history of craftsmanship is not a succession of inventions or unique (or supposedly unique) works. Actually; Craftsmanship has no history, if we conceive history as an uninterrupted series of changes. Between his past and his present there is no rupture but continuity. The modern artist is launched to conquer eternity and the designer to that of the future; the craftsman allows himself to be conquered by time.
The ancient artist wanted to resemble his elders, to be worthy of them through imitation. The modern artist wants to be different and his homage to tradition is to deny it. When you look for a tradition, you look for it outside the West, in the art of primitives or in that of other civilizations. The archaism of the primitive or the antiquity of the Sumerian or Mayan object, because they are denials of Western tradition, are paradoxical forms of novelty. The aesthetics of change demand that each work be new and different from those that precede it; In turn, novelty implies the denial of immediate tradition. Tradition becomes a succession of ruptures. The frenzy of change also governs industrial production, although for different reasons: each new object, the result of a new procedure, dislodges the object that precedes it. The history of craftsmanship is not a succession of inventions or unique (or supposedly unique) works. In reality, craftsmanship has no history, if we conceive of history as an uninterrupted series of changes. Between his past and his present there is no rupture, but continuity. The modern artist is launched to conquer eternity and the designer to that of the future; the craftsman allows himself to be conquered by time. Traditional but not historical, tied to the past but free of dates, the artisanal object teaches us to distrust the mirages of history and the illusions of the future. The craftsman does not want to defeat time, but rather join its flow. Through repetitions that are also imperceptible but real variations, his works persist. This way they survive the up-to-date object.
Industrial design tends towards impersonality. It is subject to the tyranny of function and its beauty lies in that submission. But functional beauty is only fully realized in geometry and only in it truth and beauty are one and the same thing; In the arts themselves, beauty is born from a necessary violation of norms. Beauty is born from a necessary violation of norms. Beauty – better said: art – is a transgression of functionality. The set of these transgressions constitutes what we call a style. The ideal of the designer, if he were logical with himself, should be the absence of style: forms reduced to their function; that of the artist, a style that began and ended in each work of art. (Perhaps this was what Mallarmé and Joyce intended.) Except that no work of art begins and ends with itself. Each one is a language that is both personal and collective: a style, a way. The styles are communal. Each work of art is a deviation and a confirmation of the style of its time and place: by violating it, it fulfills it. Craftsmanship, again, is in an equidistant position: like design, it is anonymous; Like the work of art, it is a style. Compared to design, the artisanal object is anonymous but not impersonal; in front of the work of art, it underlines the collective character of the style and reveals to us that the conceited self of the artist is a we.
Craftsmanship, again, is in an equidistant position: like design, it is anonymous; Like the work of art, it is a style. Compared to design, the artisanal object is anonymous but not impersonal; in front of the work of art, it underlines the collective character of the style and reveals to us that the conceited self of the artist is a we.
The technique is international. Its constructions, its procedures and its products are the same everywhere. By suppressing national and regional particularities and peculiarities, it impoverishes the world. Through its global diffusion, the technique has become the most powerful agent of historical entropy. The negative character of its action can be condensed in this phrase: it uniforms without uniting. It flattens the differences between different cultures and national styles, but it does not eradicate rivalries and hatred between people and states. After transforming rivals into identical twins, he arms them with the same weapons. The danger of technology lies not only in the deadly nature of many of its inventions but also in the fact that it threatens the historical process in its essence. By ending the diversity of societies and cultures, it ends history itself. The astonishing variety of societies produces history: encounters and conjunctions of different groups and cultures and of strange techniques and ideas. The historical process has an undoubted analogy with the double phenomenon that biologists call imbreeding and outbreeding and anthropologists call endogamy and exogamy. The great civilizations have been syntheses of different and contradictory cultures. Where a civilization has not had to face the threat and stimulus of another civilization – as happened with pre-Columbian America until the 16th century – its destiny is to set the pace and walk in circles. The experience of the other is the secret of change, also of life.
Modern technology has brought about numerous and profound transformations, but all in the same direction and with the same meaning: the elimination of the other. By leaving men's aggressiveness intact and making them uniform, it has strengthened the causes that tend to their extinction. On the other hand, craftsmanship is not even national: it is local. Indifferent to borders and systems of government, it survives republics and empires: the pottery, basketry and musical instruments that appear in the Bonampak frescoes have survived the Mayan priests, the Aztec warriors, the colonial friars and the Mexican presidents. They will also survive American tourists. The artisans have no homeland: they are from their village. And more: they are from his neighborhood and even from his family. Artisans defend us from the unification of technique and its geometric deserts. By preserving differences, they preserve the fruitfulness of history.
the craftsmanship is not even national: it is local (…) The artisans have no homeland: they are from their village. And more: they are from his neighborhood and even from his family. Artisans defend us from the unification of technique and its geometric deserts. By preserving differences, they preserve the fruitfulness of history.
The artisan is not defined by his nationality or his religion. He is not loyal to an idea or an image, but to a practice: his craft. The work of the craftsman is rarely solitary and is not overly specialized, as in industry. Their day is not divided by a rigid schedule but by a rhythm that has more to do with that of the body and sensitivity than with the abstract needs of production. While working he can talk and sometimes sing. His boss is not an invisible character but an old man who is his teacher and who is almost always his relative or, at least, his neighbor. It is revealing that, despite its markedly collectivist nature, the artisan workshop has not served as a model for any of the great utopias of the West. From the city of the sun of Campanella to the phalanstery of Fourier and from this to the communist society of Marx, the prototypes of the perfect social man have not been the artisans but the wise-priests, the gardeners-philosophers and the universal worker, in which Praxis and science merge. I do not think, of course, that the artisans' workshop is the image of perfection; I believe that its very imperfection tells us how we could humanize our society: its imperfection is that of men, not that of systems. Due to its size and the number of people that make it up, the community of artisans is conducive to democratic coexistence; Its organization is hierarchical but not authoritarian and its hierarchy is not based on power but on know-how: teachers, officers, apprentices; In short, artisanal work is a task that also participates in play and creation. After having given us a lesson in sensitivity and fantasy, craftsmanship gives us one in politics.
Even a few years ago the general opinion was that crafts were doomed to disappear, displaced by industry. Today precisely the opposite is happening: for better or worse, objects made with hands are already part of the world market. Products from Afghanistan and Sudan are sold in the same stores where you can buy new industrial design from Italy or Japan. The renaissance is notable especially in industrialized countries and affects the consumer as well as the producer. Where the industrial concentration is greater – for example: in Massachusetts – we are witnessing the resurrection of the old trades of potter, carpenter, glazier; Many young men and women, fed up and disgusted with modern society, have returned to artisanal work. In countries dominated (untimely) by the fanaticism of industrialization, there has also been a revitalization of crafts. Often governments themselves stimulate artisanal production. The phenomenon is disturbing, because the government request is generally inspired by commercial reasons. The artisans who today are the object of the paternalism of official planners, yesterday were hardly threatened by the modernization projects of those same bureaucrats, intoxicated by the economic theories learned in Moscow, London or New York. Bureaucracies are the natural enemies of the artisan and every time they try to “guide” him, they deform his sensitivity, mutilate his imagination and degrade his works.
The artisan is not defined by his nationality or his religion. He is not loyal to an idea or an image but to a practice: his craft. The workshop is a social microcosm governed by its own laws. The work of the craftsman is rarely solitary and is not exaggeratedly specialized as in industry. Their day is not divided by a rigid schedule but by a rhythm that has more to do with that of the body and sensitivity than with the abstract needs of production. While working he can talk and sometimes sing. His boss is not an invisible character but an old man who is his teacher and who is almost always his relative or, at least, his neighbor.
The return to craftsmanship in the United States and Western Europe is one of the symptoms of the great change in contemporary sensibility. We are facing another expression of criticism of the abstract religion of progress and the quantitative vision of man and nature. True, to suffer the disappointment of progress you must first go through the experience of progress. It is not easy for underdeveloped countries to share this disillusionment, even if the ruinous nature of industrial super-productivity is increasingly palpable. Nobody learns in someone else's head. However, how can we not see what the belief in infinite progress has become? If every civilization ends in a pile of ruins – an overcrowding of broken statues, collapsed columns, torn writings – those of industrial society are doubly impressive: because they are immense and because they are premature. Our ruins are beginning to be larger than our buildings and threaten to bury us alive. That is why the popularity of crafts is a sign of health, as is the return to Thoreau and Blake or the rediscovery of Fourier. The senses, instinct and imagination always precede reason. Criticism of our civilization was initiated by the romantic poets precisely at the beginning of the industrial era. The poetry of the 20th century captured and deepened the romantic revolt, but only now does that spiritual rebellion penetrate the spirit of the majority. Modern society is beginning to doubt the principles that founded it two centuries ago and seeks to change course. Hopefully it's not too late.
Due to its size and the number of people that make it up, the community of artisans is conducive to democratic coexistence; Its organization is hierarchical but not authoritarian and its hierarchy is not based on power but on know-how: teachers, officers, apprentices; In short, artisanal work is a task that also participates in play and creation. After having given us a lesson in sensitivity and fantasy, craftsmanship gives us one in politics.
The destination of the work of art is the refrigerated eternity of the museum; The destination of the industrial object is the garbage dump. Craftsmanship escapes the museum and, when it falls into its showcases, it is defended with honor: it is not a unique object but a sample. It is a captive specimen, not an idol. Craftsmanship does not keep pace with time and does not want to overcome it either. Experts periodically examine the advances of death in works of art: the cracks in the paint, the fading of the lines, the change of colors, the leprosy that corrodes both Amanta's frescoes and Leonardo's canvases. . The work of art, as a thing, is not eternal.
The destination of the work of art is the refrigerated eternity of the museum; The destination of the industrial object is the garbage dump. Craftsmanship escapes the museum and, when it falls into its showcases, it is defended with honor: it is not a unique object but a sample. It is a captive specimen, not an idol.
And as an idea? Ideas also age and die. But artists often forget that their work is the owner of the secret of true time: not the hollow eternity but the liveliness of the moment. Furthermore, the work of art has the capacity to fertilize spirits and resurrect, even as a negation, in the works that are its offspring. For the industrial object there is no resurrection: it disappears as quickly as it appears. If it didn't leave traces, it would really be perfect; Unfortunately, it has a body and, once it is no longer useful, it becomes waste that is difficult to destruct. The indecency of garbage is no less pathetic than that of the false eternity of the museum. Craftsmanship does not want to last for millennia nor is it possessed by the rush to die soon. It passes with the days, it flows with us, it is spent little by little, it does not seek death nor deny it: it accepts it. Between the timeless time of the museum and the accelerated time of technique, craftsmanship is the heartbeat of human time. It is a useful object but it is also beautiful; an object that lasts but that ends and is resigned to ending; an object that is not unique like the work of art and that can be replaced by another similar but not identical object. Craftsmanship teaches us to die and thus teaches us to live.
Craftsmanship does not want to last for millennia nor is it possessed by the rush to die soon. It passes with the days, it flows with us, it is spent little by little, it does not seek death nor deny it: it accepts it (...) craftsmanship is the heartbeat of human time. It is a useful object but it is also beautiful; an object that lasts but that ends and is resigned to ending; an object that is not unique like the work of art and that can be replaced by another similar but not identical object. Craftsmanship teaches us to die and thus teaches us to live