just add water.

I got a catalog in the mail yesterday from art.com.  Some of the images are rather attractive, some are not...but art?  Can you get art from mass mailing?  A tapestry print of Klimt's The Kiss - a fine painting yes, but woven in cotton/rayon for the low, low price of 255.99?  I really don't think it is the same.
This is design - color to enhance the living environment - and I don't criticize that, color to enhance life is essential (I remind you my living room is orange) and Poppy II would look splendid over my bed. 

But brushstroked canvas?  That means a probably computer generated print with manual or mechanized clear texture laid over the top.  The illusion of creativity.

I have art prints - but I like them for not pretending to be the Kandinsky I cannot afford.  And it isn't that I don't think beauty and mass production are compatible.  I mean, if anyone has eight of these lying around I'd be happy to find a place for them.

Really, it would be no trouble. (I sat on these chairs at a great restaurant in Philly last weekend.  Gorgeous and still comfortable after three hours of words and food. The most charming waitress in the world, cute as hell, helped me find out where the chairs came from (I was a woman obsessed, I tell you) and didn't once give us the evil eye for ordering desert and keeping her from a second seating.)

Satisfying shape and color can be found at Maria Yee, or the yarn shop, or the museum gift shop, or the back garden.  And designing furniture, or yarn, and applying historic motifs to everyday objects, and gardening are all creative acts.  I am positive whoever made my lentil salad was an artist of no small genius.  Warm goat cheese and sherry, mmmmm.

But in general, I think something has gone missing.

I used to think the martha-fication of design was a good thing, that it could only be pleasant and positive to have elements of clean shape and color trickle down the market to permeate everyday life.  I was pleased when suburbia began looking pretty sharp in capri khakis and duck's egg blue fitted Ts and you could get garden implements in a fetching shade of green at K-mart, for what could be wrong with having everyday objects designed well and prettily?

Nothing, except that there's a uniformity to it now - these catalogs thunking through my mail slot have a sameness despite their frantic pace of renewal to tempt our short attention spans.  A blandness to their careful images, a tendency to be a bit indistinguishable despite the several aesthetics competing for my dollars.

I remember a time in life when if I heard live music and it deviated in any way from the familiar recorded version, I deemed it a failure.  Of course, I thought soulfully romantic black and white photography was the apogee of style then too, so clearly I knew very little. 
Now when I hear someone play I cherish the performance, the alchemy of the moment, the version of a song brought out of that day and time - the flaws and chemistry and serendipitous joy that make it unique.

Because there is such a thing as a perfect moment, but I'm not sure there is much else that can be.  Or should be.  When we try to make our sweaters, or houses, or children, or lives perfect, they lose something.  We lose something, holding so tight that the good stuff can slip through our fingers like water.

I used to have this friend who fought so hard against feeling scary things, feeling anything soft - maudlin he called it -  and was battered and made remote by the struggle to resist.  It is odd too, when I think that he was the best museum going companion I've ever had, observant and engaged and seeing so much in everything that he awakened my eye for the world utterly.  He wasn't afraid to let the emotions and impressions of an artist into him, though he refused the necessary surrender in his own life.

Because you do have to surrender to things if they're going to touch you, feel that the flaws and pain and exhilaration and risk is where the beauty is  - beauty rather than prettiness.  I think that while there is absolutely craft in art, there is also emotion, passion, expression.  Things that are missing from catalog living.

I see us all spinning and knitting, making music, hurling down mountains one way or the other, the explosion of crafting, sewing, writing; slow food and great home cooking, esoteric tea drinking and passionate gardening as part of a compulsion to restore some art to our lives, to get past the plastic and find passion, color...a sense of our selves as creative individuals outside the blank, bland face of mass style.  Someone said to me - a new friend I think - at that dinner with the chairs, that with everything going on, it gives her hope to find someone talking passionately about making a great lentil salad.  I absolutely get it; behind the fear and uncertainty of the world, we're trying to make something good, to taste, feel, live.

 

Comments

[BigAlice]

Thank you, you articulated something that has been bumping around my head for a while. It feels as if the world is getting more homogenous, despite all the explosion of connectivity, access to so many ideas and objects that were rare and obscure before (or maybe it's because of this). These catalogs you talk about remind me of this, that so much seems to be just a soulless copy of the original.

I think this is one of the primary reasons that I feel like I have to make something, by hand, just me. It's why I feel such an urge to create completely original things.

[Melanie]

I suspect that's one of the things I like so much about wandering through antique stores--because if you look at some everyday object from 100 or 200 or howevermany years ago, before mass production existed (or, for Victoriana, wasn't quite so mechanized), they're not just functional. The makers couldn't resist the temptation to add a bit of decoration--a curlicue here, a pattern there, a bit of paint, a little carving.

Today, unless you seek out the artisans and the unusual, it's all much of a muchness. Which would be profoundly depressing but for the increasing popularity of making things yourself, whether it's quilts or sweaters or jewelry or potato guns.

[Bakerina]

If this sounds at all hyperbolic, I promise you that it is not: Reading this wonderful essay makes me feel glad to be alive. Thank you, dearest. :)

Back in my trying-to-sell-jam-for-a-living days, I once bought a book on how to sell your specialty food product. There was a lot of emphasis on being sure that you sold something that was available year-round, because availability and ubiquity were the keys to a successful food business. There was also a lot of emphasis on uniformity, and on making sure that you had quality-control procedures to ensure that you didn't have one batch of jam turn out thicker, or looser, or more brightly-colored, than the batch that came before. It was at that point that I became so exhausted and saddened by the message that I had to put the book down. One of my favorite things about both baking and jam-making is that while you can exercise a lot of control to achieve a more-or-less consistent result, there will always be little variables -- the moisture in the air, the heat in your hands, a basket of fruit where some pieces have more sugar than others -- that make every new batch a surprise. I love this, and it drives me bonkers to hear it described as a liability.

Fortunately, I am not alone. The late, great bread baker/artist Lionel Poilane knew that bread dough was a living thing, and that having a super-rigid quality process might prevent those less-than-perfect loaves, but it would also prevent the loaves that were just marvelous, a revelation of what flour, water and salt can do together. His daughters, who took over the bakery after his death in 2002, learned the lesson well, as did the hundreds of bakers that Chef Poilane trained in his career. Knowing that they're out there makes me feel hopeful and glad.

[Cara]

I try very hard to live my life this way. Even if my couches are from Pottery Barn and I have Klee prints on my wall. (At least they're not tapestries!) Thank you for your thoughts.

[Lee]

Thank you. Thought provoking, intelligent words to mull over all day.

[Marti]

I can't believe I haven't been reading your blog all along. Fanatastic post.

[sarah]

We have real live art on our walls (also books) and in our garden. This astonishes visitors, all of whom seem to think original art (no matter how inexpensive) is the province of art galleries and stately homes. I live in hope that some of them go out and buy stuff they like for their walls after seeing ours. Surrender is good, sadly I can't demolish enough of my walls to be able to dance to the music I love. As for the revival of 'craft' (in the best sense), I think it's significant that so many of us have day jobs producing ephemera, or things that don't exist at all (like spreadsheets). Not only do humans have a very basic need/desire to be surrounded by attractive stuff in daily life, we also need to make. real. things. Tangible proof that we exist.

[Jussi]

that search for the authentic...and I can't find it because the malls of generica are all filled with the same rubbish!
I enjoyed this post immensely - thank you

[Kate]

I went to go see Hamlet performed this last weekend. The way they played it, he reminded me of my 'lost youth'; you know, those teenage years when everything you felt cut you to the quick, when life was full of intense beauty and deep blackness, all at the same time.

I've gladly left those years behind, and even though I'm only 23 I feel much more centred in myself, much more peaceful, and I'm happy with the life I lead. But remembering those years, watching Hamlet walk the stage in agony and ecstacy, made me... homesick, I guess is the closest feeling. It wasn't the warm glow of nostalgia, it was a full-force feeling that hit me in the stomach.

It was good. I think we all need reminders to feel, jolts to wake us up, to look at the world again. I firmly believe that we can't all go around seeing the world as it is, we need our nice, safe, pretend worlds to get on with our lives. Hamlet is selfish, essantially, in his pain and madness. He achieves nothing good and, in fact, everyone dies in the end. But the opposite is Pelonious, walking around in his haze of comfort, doing nothing good either, spreading bad in his own way.

What we DON'T need, is prettiness, or at least too much of it. Beauty, real, true beauty, can make us feel or think or any number of things. But prettiness, that mass-produced niceness, just lulls us further into that haze.

You'r right about surrender - to really feel something, you have to let go of your day-to-day feelings and thoughts, to let what has pierced your bubble in and take over, at least for a while. Otherwise, what was true and strong becomes washed out and shallow, worse than if it had never come along.

The trouble, then, is that when we craft etc, and we make things that look (coincidentally) like a Martha creation, or anything else... which side of the line does it fall on?

[anne]

in a way, the catalogs have become the new mall. i can get a little angry sometimes that there is such a waste of paper for that; i could tolerate the waste more if they offered something unique, maybe, or if they didn't feel like an assault of bore. i wonder if those purveyors realize what a turnoff they have become, how they are anti-advertising themselves . . .
and yes, yay! for the imperfect original. we live with a large collection of paintings and other pieces of original art, all traded for or bought from familiar characters wherever we have lived. sometimes bought instead of groceries that week, but possibly just as nourishing. living with these things is constantly inspiring and rejuvenating.

[Sylvia]

No wonder I've always had an aversion to catalogs. Thank you for, once again, lending clarity to my perception of reality.

[--Deb]

Great post--lots of food for thought in there. Nothing wrong with conformity, and yet . . .

[Lise in NJ]

A danger with Martha and that is the sameness, the fuss not for real beauty or even real prettiness, but for the sake of fuss.
But navel gazing? Not hardly. Much more a quiet celebration of passion, of real feeling and perhaps individuality. And the genuine joys of a good meal in good company, eaten in a comfortable chair.

[Amy]

Oh, and I saw the Klimt in the Belvedere. Every copy, every postcard, every shawl, every print with the embosssed gold...doesn't get it right. You have to be there, and then you don't see the kiss, you feel the heavy clothes, and you can feel the breeze, and you can feel toes dangling over the precipice. There is story captured in it that you can't find elsewhere. It's beauty that I am quite certain he never wanted commercialized the way it is now.

[Amy]

Sometimes I just want to hug you.

You're wonderful.

[Janine B.]

Totally! Thanks for finding the right words--I've stumbled around for some time trying to articulate the value of authenticity vs. the stasis of "perfection." Is it OK if I make a copy of this and pass it off as my own???!

[Ruth]

Well said. There is so much more to living beautifully - nowadays "homemaking" magazines have become as inadequacy-inducing as those poreless, weightless supermodels. So much of what we are now reclaiming - making our own music, our own clothes, food and art was done as a matter of course only a few generations ago. How did we come to believe that these things are insurmountably difficult, and only of value if "professionally" mass-produced and marketed to us?

[Marlene]

You make me want to go and paint an original, totally ME painting --- and be damned to the art critic wanna bes who might say it was junk or offer suggestions to "improve" it.

[lanea]

I think a huge part of my particular obsessiveness is about finding and engaging in something that's not machine made and brand new and entirely souless. We shouldn't all have identical anything. We should be so much more than consumers. Our variety of shapes and sizes and tastes and views should be celebrated. But it's not--not out there in the big bad. I have a muse and an artistic vision because my synapses don't always fire on time, and because my eye has a big clear "flaw" in it, and because of both my health and my illness.

[Rabbitch]

I like this. However, me? I'm doing my "art" 'cause they wouldn't let me play with paints in school. It's a way of thumbing my nose at my mother while paying the gas bill.

I'm going to play with clay today. *g*

[Sonya]

I know I could google it, but isn't omphaloskepsis something to do with the belly button of the world? Obscure Grecian thing. Anyway, well put - rally against the uniformity, the convenience and ease. I would much rather own art that I know actual hands created or played some part in. That said, I can't afford a Kandinsky, but I make do with garage and rummage sale finds, pieces from Etsy or from coffee shops. Lentil salad for thought.

[Jenn]

What a beautiful post. I especially like the part about surrender. Thank you.

[Marty52]

That's why we do what we do. To have something wonderful and beautiful and all ours. To knit that sweater our way, to stitch a quilt that says "ME," to make a great lentil salad, to make a statement that says I am different and that is good. Great post.