The Contest over Quality
This is the syllabus for a course I taught in Haverford College's Independent College Programs in spring 2017: "The Contest over Quality: The Ethics and Politics of Craft and Design." The course puts and explores one central question: What balance should we as individuals strike between craft, design, and marketing; given that the world economy is increasingly elevating design and marketing over craft, while all have undoubted values? How much authority should we give to design, and how much to craft? How can we tell what is good quality and what isn’t, when people disagree so vehemently and in apparent good faith about what is good and why? Feel free to e-mail me with questions about the course at tjdonahueAThaverford.edu.
What Is the Relation Among Marketing, Kitsch, and Design?
The source of Donald Trump's first bankruptcy (jamvitter; Flickr; fair use)
Honest Craft?
(Click to enlarge; Decorus Furniture; fair use)
Truth to Materials vs. Traditional Ornament? Looshaus of 1910 next to St. Michael's Church, Vienna
(Click to enlarge; SeleccionArte; fair use)
Is Craft the Key to Quality?
Good Design, Good Materials, Good Marketing
Cowboy Up! from susanne eeg on Vimeo (fair use).
(Danish shoemaker Louise Hvidegaard travels to Redmond, Oregon to learn the craft of hand-welted bootmaking from D. W. Frommer II)
The Bialetti Moka Express, since 1933
(Wikimedia Commons)
Design without Craft? Modernism
Must We Choose between Traditional Crafts and Modernist Design?
Barcelona chair designed by Mies van der Rohe
(click to enlarge; Wikimedia Commons)
Butaque chair designed by Clara Porset, 1950;
sabino wood and woven jute
(click to enlarge; Don Shoemaker Furniture; fair use)
iPhone 5S
(Wikimedia Commons)
Modernism Merged with Craft: The National Anthropology Museum of Mexico, 1964
The Central Courtyard with Sculpted Pillar
and Concrete Umbrella
(Click to enlarge; Mxcity.mx; fair use)
Tropical Hardwood Block Flooring, Laid by Hand
Second Floor of the Museum
(Alamo Hardwoods; fair use)
Modernist Truth to Materials vs. Postmodernist Artful Illusion?
The Seagram Building, New York City (1958)
AT&T Building/Sony Tower, New York City (1984)
Architect Philip Johnson chose pink granite cladding over steel frame, which he meant to look as if the structure was built with masonry construction; he also chose an ornamental top in the shape of a broken pediment. With this building, Johnson's break with his prior modernist minimalist functionalism was obvious to all.
Bronze flange beams and brown tinted windows; since the building would house a whiskey distiller, architects Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson wanted a brown-colored metal; and as modernist minimalists, they wanted a facade that would express the material that actually holds up the building: steel. Their solution was beams of bronze, which had to be custom-made.
(Click to enlarge; WTTW.com; fair use)
Design Proposes, Craft Disposes?
Roofers Interpreting the Design of Felix Candela for Los Manantiales Restaurant, Xochimilco, Mexico City
(Click to enlarge; Pinterest; fair use)
The Completed Building in Xochimilco
(Click to enlarge; Lo que fuimos tumblr; fair use)
Which Functions Are Relevant to an Object's Form?
Meret Oppenheim, Fur Breakfast (1936; MOMA; fair use)
The Difference Care for Materials Makes?
A Monument of Brutalist Architecture: Erno Goldfinger's Trellick Tower, London 1968-1972
(Brutalist Constructions; fair use; click to enlarge)
A Monument
of Modernist Architecture in Concrete (but not Brutalist in style): I. M. Pei's National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado (1967)
Note how the building's color harmonizes with the red sandstone in the Flatiron Mountains in the background.
(Architect's Learning Handbook; fair use)
The Concrete for Trellick Tower -- Bush hammered
(Brutalist Constructions; fair use; click to enlarge)
The Concrete for Pei's NCAR -- Ribbed and tooled, the concrete was mixed with red sandstone taken from the neighboring Flatiron Mountains
(M. Gerwing Architects blog; fair use)
What works good is better than what looks good, because what works good lasts.
Eventually, everything connects -- people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se.
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
--Tom Stoppard
God is in the details.
No ornament can any longer be made today by anyone who lives on our cultural level ... Freedom from ornament is a sign of spiritual strength.
--Adolf Loos
Less is more...My architecture is almost nothing.
Less is a bore.
To give people pleasure in the things they must perforce use, that is one great office of decoration; to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce make, that is the other [office].
The creations of mechanical technique are organisms tending to a pure functioning, and obey the same evolutionary laws as those objects in nature which excite our admiration.
FASHION, n. A despot whom the wise ridicule and obey.
Design habits [that conceal] structure have no place in [modern art]...[I]n architecture, as in all art, the artist [should keep] the marks which reveal how a thing was done. The feeling that [modernist] architecture needs embellishment stems in part from our tendency to fair joints out of sight, to conceal how parts are put together...[Ornament should] grow out of our love for the expression of...how it is done.
[Why can't we bring Apple manufacturing jobs back to the US from China?] Those jobs aren't coming back.
--Steve Jobs
The plan is the generator...Without plan there can be neither grandeur of aim and expression, nor rhythm, nor mass, nor coherence...A plan calls for the most active imagination. It calls for the most severe discipline also. The plan is what determines everything. It is the decisive moment.
--Le Corbusier
[The machine aesthetic movement within modernism] sought to wean workers from the historic styles compatible with craft production and promoted the simple, austere furnishings produced by machines. But [they] were not easily persuaded that the stark, severe forms of the machine were beautiful and should be welcomed in their homes. Unlike architects and reformers, workers...were well aware of the human degradation and ugliness perpetuated by [the workings of mechanized factories]. In their minds...mass-produced products that bore the aesthetic marks of this labor process were ugly and inappropriate for the home, where they sought escape and compensation. So workers joined other[s] in seeking an aesthetic in consumer goods that concealed rather than revealed the marks of the production process.
--David Gartman
In July [1988], a few days after new cable channel TNT announced plans to make a movie about [Donald] Trump’s life—“I want a very good-looking guy to play me,” Trump told the New York Post—Trump called a news conference on Independence Day because he wanted to show reporters his yacht, which he had bought, he said, without ever having boarded the boat.
A man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body.
What good does it do you to believe in good things?...It's feudal and futile.
The craftsman's primary aim is to create objects which have an assigned place in the world of common activities but which, at the same time, by virtue of their formal structures and aesthetic qualities, present themselves as intrinsically [rather than just instrumentally] valuable...An object which retains either function or aesthetic properties but not both loses the special complexity which gives craft its unique appeal.
--C. B. Fethe
Form ever follows function.
Function follows form.
A house is a machine for living in.
Yeah, just like the human heart is a suction pump.
When two materials come together, brother, watch out!
Never forget the material you are working with, and try always to use it for what it can do best; if you feel yourself hampered by the material in which you are working, instead of being helped by it, you have so far not learned your business.
--William Morris
Every citizen is required to replace his hangings, his damasks, his wall-papers, his stencils, with a plain coat of white ripolin. His home is made clean. There are no more dirty, dark corners. Everything is shown as it is. The comes inner cleanliness...once you have put ripolin on your walls you will be master of yourself.
--Le Corbusier
Dishonesty entered the world of architecture in the 19th C, when, for the first time, the whole of history became available to ambitious nouveaux riches...In every case they chose a historicist style in order to give credentials to their very recent achievements.
Mass production demands a search for standards. Standards lead to perfection.
--Le Corbusier
We shape our buildings and, afterwards, our buildings shape us.
--Winston Churchill
Style is like a feather in a woman's hat; nothing more.
--Le Corbusier
A style is not a set of rules and shackles, as some of my colleagues seem to think. A style is a climate in which to operate, a springboard to leap further into the air.
--Philip Johnson
The overarching concern of the Modern Movement was to break down barriers between aesthetics, technics, and society, in order that an appropriate design of the highest visual and practical quality could be produced for the mass of the population. [The second concern] was to combat the alienation apparent in modern, urban society. [The third was to create designs that stressed] truth...the avoidance of contrivances which created an illusion or false impression. The way an object was made had to be apparent and its visual attractiveness had to come directly out of those processes of construction. [Hence] the wholesale rejection of decoration, especially when it was perceived to be an element added after the major constructional work had taken place. Decoration could only mask the structural and spatial honesty of the object.
--Paul Greenhalgh
The Contest over Quality: The Ethics and Politics of Craft and Design
ICPRH374/POLSH374
Spring 2017
M 7:30pm-10pm
Location: Gest 103
Office hours: Tues, 2-4pm, the COOP. Or by apptmt.
Mailbox: Hall Building faculty mailroom
tjdonahueAThaverford.edu
Size matters in the world economy. The big fish, often aided by governments, eat up, buy out, or marginalize the little fish. And there is much to be said for this. Economies of scale and streamlined design processes let big makers produce ever niftier gadgets at ever lower prices. This benefits everybody: people living in mud huts today have smartphones. But something important is also lost. Dedication, handwork, good materials, adjusting the work to the environment in which it’s done, putting your soul into it, learning from tradition, respect for excellence—in short, craft—is being marginalized. Craft is forced aside by design and marketing, over which big corporations and designing persons have the decisive edge. This obviously harms small and scrupulous makers. But it harms others too. For in a world economy in which designers are the heroes and marketers the hatchet men, work and its products become ever more abstract and insubstantial. The design and how to spin it are what have authority nowadays; the process and the making are seen as dirty, unskilled jobs. All that was solid is, it seems, melting into bullshit. So-called knowledge workers with fancy degrees are consigned to cubicles where they spend their days entering data. Design and spin, not craft, have become the touchstone of quality.
Against this, a world economy in which Steve Jobs is the messiah, a diverse social movement is arising. Craftspeople, amateurs, DIYers, tinkerers, plain-speakers, hobbyists, connoisseurs, anarcho-syndicalists, labor advocates, dropouts from the cubicle force, and environmental activists are, despite their numerous disagreements, making common cause. Their aim is to smash the hegemony of design and spin over the world economy, and to put craft and small batches back in a place of honor and authority. And if that means challenging the collusion between governments and the big corporation, so be it. For them, craft, not design, is the key to quality.
This course seeks to help students understand the contending forces and values at play in this contest over quality. It centers on one main question: What balance should we as individuals strike between craft and design, given that both have undoubted values? How much authority should we give to design, and how much to craft? How can we tell what is good quality and what isn’t, when people disagree so vehemently and in apparent good faith about what is good and why? To answer this question, we will examine how the world economy and society have become ever more abstract, focused on images and unexamined ideas, rather than things and worked-out concepts. We will look at the exploitation involved in the making of industrial necessities and luxury goods, and the alienation inherent in both the manufacturing work of today and much so-called “knowledge work.” We examine how design and marketing triumphed over craft in their struggle for authority, thanks in good part to modernism’s attempts to achieve social justice and efficiency through large-scale industrial production. Next, we look at the value of good design and marketing: what they achieve and what they give to the world. We then examine the nature and value of craft, work(wo)manship, and design. We will look at arguments that only handwork and dedication reliably prevent alienation from one’s labor in the new hyper-capitalism, and at defenses of the budding handcrafts movement. We consider theories that craft is always on the side of those with time and money; is this true, or can craft be used to challenge unjust hierarchies? We will also examine our own crafts as scholars and thinkers: inquiring, debating, researching, theorizing, etc. We will focus on examining and honing the craft of research.
The course aims to help students get clear on what role craft, design, art, and artfulness do and should play in their lives, as citizens, scholars, workers, consumers, etc. In so doing, it seeks to help fulfill Independent College Programs’ mission as the interconnector of the disciplines at Haverford College, and to contribute to the College’s initiatives in visual and material culture. To that end, we will try to visit the workshop of one of the Philadelphia area’s master craftspeople, examine the artful websites of high-status vendors of interior design, visit a dealer of furnishings made with honest materials, and visit an artisan’s worksite. As we shall see, there is plenty of craft and design to be found, and much where you would least expect it.
Course Objectives. By the end of the course, students should:
(1) Have mastered the concepts craft, crafts, design, art, workmanship, skill, and be familiar with different interpretations of those concepts;
(2) Have come up with articulate descriptions of the value of craft, of the value of design, and of why the two are seen to conflict in today's world economy;
(3) Understand the core components of craft as a process, and of design as a process;
(4) Be able to explain how design and art triumphed over craft in the twentieth century;
(5) Be able to explain modernism’s ambivalent attitude toward honest craft;
(6) Be able to describe how we have arrived at a society in which image, spin, fashion, spectacle, brands, and airy concepts are valued over substance, honest speech, tradition, and worked-out designs, and
what the value is in both sets of objects;
(7) Have a sense for how craft, design, and art fit into material culture and the working world;
(8) Have thought through in what way they in their own educations are using and honing crafts;
(9) Have honed their ability to specify how and why specific values clash when dealing with craft and design;
(10) Have learned how to accurately describe the structure of a theory, specifying its key concepts, its main claims, the basic model underlying it, and the question to which it is an answer;
(11) Have worked out for themselves a detailed and developed argument arguing a thesis about one of the questions covered in the course.
(12) Have honed their skills in the craft of research, mastering and applying concepts like narrowing down a topic, asking a research question, posing a research problem for a specific audience, solving a research problem, drafting a research paper, revising with an audience in mind.
Course Requirements. To earn full credit, you must:
(1) Participate in class discussion. I know many people find this daunting. Nevertheless, try. One main aim of the course is to help you improve in argument.
(2) Take any field trips to meet craftspeople and dealers of crafts that we may take.
(3) Submit 6 short papers. Each session, you may submit in hard copy a paper, of not more than 350 words, that examines some thesis that that week’s reading has argued. The paper should state the thesis and then argue for or against it. If you argue for it, you should provide your own reasons for it--not the author's reasons. Here's an example: "Judith Shklar argues that it was better to proceed with the Tokyo and Nuremberg Trials than to summarily punish the accused, as Winston Churchill had proposed. I shall argue instead that it would have been better to follow Churchill's proposal and summarily punish the accused. My main reason will be that summarily punishing the top leaders while avoiding trials would have given the world the punishment it wanted to see, while ensuring that no one could argue that the Allies were using corrupt and unjust legal procedures to obtain predetermined political results. By contrast, the trials muddied the distinction between normal times and extraordinary times, and thus encouraged people to think that the Allies valued neither legality nor justice." Click here for guidelines on writing response papers. Note that for full credit, you need only submit 6 such papers. Deadlines for submitting two and then four of the papers are marked on the syllabus.
(4) Submit a paper proposal. You are required to submit, in Session 8, a proposal for your final paper. The proposal should state a question concerning one of the topics covered in the course, say why the question is important, state your answer to the question (i.e., your thesis), give the key reasons by which you will defend the thesis, state two serious objections to your thesis, and state how you will respond to the objections. The proposal should be not more than 800 words long.
(5) Submit a final paper. You are required to submit, on the last day of exams, a final paper. The paper should state a question concerning one of the topics covered in the course, say why the question is important, state your answer to the question (i.e., your thesis), defend the thesis with argument, state two serious objections to your thesis, and respond to the objections. The paper should be not more than 4,000 words long.
Course Assessment. Course marks will be computed on the following distribution: Class Participation: 20%; Response Papers: 30% (5% each); Paper Proposal: 20%; Argumentative Paper: 30%
Course format. The course will be discussion oriented. I will usually begin sessions by presenting a thesis advanced in the week’s reading. I will discuss its implications. I will then ask one or many of you whether you think the thesis true or false, and why. We shall then examine the reasons you offer for your view. We shall then turn to the reasons the text offers in defense of the thesis. I will ask you what you think of those reasons, and so forth. The course in part aims to improve your skill in reasoned argument.
REQUIRED BOOKS
[1] The Craft Reader, ed. Glenn Adamson (Berg, 2010)
[2] Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (Penguin, 2009)
[3] David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship (Cambridge UP, 1968)
RECOMMENDED TEXTS
[1] John Heskett, Design: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2005; available online through Tri-Co libraries)
[2] Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy (Princeton UP, 1994)
[3] Naomi Klein, No Logo (Picador, 2009)
[4] Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton UP, 2005)
[5] Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton UP, 1999)
[6] W. Booth, G. Colomb, & J. Williams, The Craft of Research (UChicago P, 2008; available online through Tri-Co libraries)
[7] Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (Yale UP, 2009; available online through Tri-Co libraries)
[8] E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (Phaidon, 1979)
[9] David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design (Herbert, 1978)
[10] Glenn Parsons, The Philosophy of Design (Polity, 2016)
[11] The Journal of Modern Craft
PART ONE. AN INTRODUCTION
Session 1. Jan 19. An Introduction to the Issues and Concepts (I): Introductory Session
So you'd like to know more...
About the decline of craft: Check out this video about George, who hand makes sturdy boots in Oregon. He wants to train someone to take over his shop and preserve the craft, but he can't find a young person
who wants to get their hands dirty and learn.
Matthew Campbell et al, "Dirty Linen: A Bed Sheets Scandal Hits the Cotton Industry," Bloomberg News (14 November 2016)
Esha Chabbra, "The Dirty Secret about Your Clothes," The Washington Post (30 December 2016)
Virginia Postrel, "How Textiles Repeatedly Revolutionized Human Technology," Aeon (5 June 2015)
Session 2. Jan 23. An Introduction to the Issues and Concepts (II)
Matthew Crawford, “A Brief Case for the Useful Arts,” Shop Class as Soulcraft, pp. 11-36
Sung Huang, “China, Factory Worker,” Invisible Hands: Voices from the Global Economy, ed. Corinne Goria (McSweeney’s, 2014): 231-256
Dieter Rams, "Ten Principles of Good Design," ArchDaily (09 January 2012)
So you'd like to know more...
-Peter Dormer, “Valuing the Handmade: Studio Crafts and the Meaning of their Style,” The Meanings of Modern Design (Thames & Hudson, 1990): 142-169
-Witold Rybczynski, "Tadao Ando and the Dream of the Perfect Chair," Architect Magazine 19 March 2014
-E. H. Gombrich, “Issues of Taste,” The Sense of Order, pp. 17-32
-Sue Halpern, "The Real Legacy of Steve Jobs," New York Review of Books (Feb 11, 2016)
-Barbara Tuchman, “The Decline of Quality,” New York Times Magazine (Nov 2, 1980)
-About the design principles of modernism: Check out these two videos on the architecture of Walter Gropius's Bauhaus building in Dessau: "Bauhaus: A History of Modern Architecture: Ep 1" and Episode 2
-About the impact of the boom of state-sponsored modernist architecture in post-war Britain: Simon Thurley, "Coming to Terms with Modern Times: English architecture in the post-war era," (Gresham College Lecture, 2013)
-About how one luxury shoemaker pulled a Steve Jobs: firing all his craftsmen and hiring untrained young people who didn't know a thing about the craft to make his shoes, which he then marketed as the best shoes in the world: Salvatore Ferragamo, “Shoemaker of Dreams,” The Craft Reader, pp. 242-252
PART TWO. THE FIX WE’RE IN
Session 3. Jan 30. The Fix We’re In: Abstracting Society, Illusion Society? The (Inescapable?) Seductions of Bullshit and Advertising. How to See Through Them, and Are They All Bad?
Naomi Klein, No Logo, Introduction
Guy Debord, “Separation Perfected,” “Commodity as Spectacle,” The Society of the Spectacle, pp. 11-34
Harry Frankfurt, "On Bullshit," widely reprinted
Gilles Lipovetsky, “Advertising on the Offensive,” The Empire of Fashion, pp. 156-173
So you'd like to know more...
-About the selling of brands, not products, that Klein discusses: No Logo documentary
-Ada Louise Huxtable, The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion (New Press, 1997)
-James Mahon, "The Reality Distortion Field of Steve Jobs," in Steve Jobs and Philosophy, ed. George Reisch (Open Court, 2015): 3-13
-NYTimes obituary of Jerome Fisher, founder of Nine West shoe company, whose business model was to make women's shoes that look like well-made high-end shoes, but skimp on those shoes' good
materials and decent construction. In essence, to sell the illusion of a well-designed, decently-made shoe.
-David Tietge, “Rhetoric Is Not Bullshit,” in Bullshit and Philosophy: Guaranteed to Get Perfect Results Every Time!, ed. Hardcastle and Reisch (Open Court, 2006): 229-240
Session 4. Feb 6. The Fix We’re In: Fashion Society, Throwaway Society?
Gilles Lipovetsky, “The Seduction of Things,” The Empire of Fashion, pp. 134-155
Joseph Guiltinan, “Creative Destruction and Destructive Creations: Environmental Ethics and Planned Obsolescence,” Journal of Business Ethics 89 (2009): 19-28
Vance Packard, “Progress through the Throwaway Spirit,” The Waste Makers (Longmans, 1960), pp. 54-64
Packard, “Progress through Planned Obsolescence,” The Waste Makers, pp. 65-78
Packard, “Planned Obsolescence of Desirability,” The Waste Makers, pp. 79-89
So you'd like to know more...
About the Populuxe style of objects that were central to the throwaway economy Packard described: "American Look," (1958 General Motors documentary)
DEADLINE TO SUBMIT TWO RESPONSE PAPERS
Session 5. Feb 13. The Fix We’re In: Exploiting Society, Alienated Work Society?
Allen W. Wood, “Capitalist Exploitation,” Karl Marx, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2004), Read 242-253 ONLY
Matthew B. Crawford, “The Separation of Thinking from Doing,” Shop Class as Soulcraft, pp. 37-53
Crawford, “The Contradictions of the Cubicle,” Shop Class as Soulcraft, pp. 126-160
Allen W. Wood, “Human Production,” “Alienation and Capitalism,” Karl Marx (Routledge, 2004), Read 31-48 ONLY
PART THREE. HOW DID WE GET HERE?
Session 6. Feb 20. How Did We Get Here? (1) How Design Triumphed over Craft and Folk Art. (2) How Modernism and Purism in Design Theory, With Admirable Social Intentions, Pulled Makers and Buyers Away from Craft
Carol Kino, “The Art Form That Dares Not Speak Its Name,” New York Times (2005)
Rafael Cardoso, “Craft versus Design: Moving Beyond a Tired Dichotomy,” in The Craft Reader, ed. Glenn Adamson, pp. 321-334.
Sennett, “The Troubled Craftsman,” The Craftsman (Yale UP 2009), pp. 19-52
Paul Greenhalgh, “Introduction,” Modernism in Design (Reaktion, 1990): 1-25.
Glenn Parsons, “Modernism,” The Philosophy of Design (Polity, 2015): 55-68
So you'd like to know more...
-About how craft began to separate from design as industrial production became ubiquitous: "The Genius of Design 1: Ghosts in the Machine," (BBC 2010)
-About the effects the increasing ubiquity of machines had on society and on craft: Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (1948; UMinnesota Press, 2014)
-On modernism as a political ideology, its aims and intentions.
-Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1981): 3-83.
-"What Makes Latin American Modern Design So Different?" (Americas Society, 2015; examines how Mexican modernist designers like Clara Porset mixed modernist forms with the forms, materials, and construction used by traditional folk crafts)
-Intelligence Squared Debate, "Prince Charles Was Right: Modern Architecture Is Still All Glass Stumps and Carbuncles," moderated by Anna Ford (2008)
-Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., “What Is Modern Design?” “What Is Good Design? What Is Modern Design? (MoMA, 1950): 7-9
Session 7. Feb 27. How Did We Get Here? (3) How Modernism and Purism in Art Criticism, with Admirable Social Intentions, Pulled Critics and
Buyers Away from Craft. (4) How (Fine) Art Triumphed over Craft and Folk Art
Noel Carroll, “Walter Benjamin and the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” A Philosophy of Mass Art (Clarendon Press, 1998): ONLY PP. 114-129 REQUIRED
Noel Carroll, "The Massification Argument," A Philosophy of Mass Art, ONLY pp. 16-24 REQUIRED
Carroll, "The Passivity Argument," A Philosophy of Mass Art, ONLY pp. 30-37 REQUIRED
Larry Shiner, “The Artist, The Work, and the Market,” The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago, 2001): 99-129
Shiner, “Art as Redemptive Revelation,” The Invention of Art, pp. 189-197
So you'd like to know more...
Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review (1939)
Dwight MacDonald, “A Theory of Mass Culture,” Diogenes (1953)
"Tom Wolfe on Modern Art," (2011)
Roger Scruton, "Kitsch" (at 9:49)
Garth Clark, “How Envy Killed the Crafts,” The Craft Reader, pp. 445-453
DEADLINE TO HAVE SUBMITTED A TOTAL OF FOUR RESPONSE PAPERS
Spring Break. Mar 6.
PART FOUR. THE VALUE AND NATURE OF CRAFT, AND OF DESIGN
Session 8. Mar 13. The Value and Goal of Craft.
R. G. Collingwood, “Art and Craft,” The Craft Reader, pp. 417-423
William Morris, “The Revival of Handicraft,” The Craft Reader, pp. 146-155
Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, “Indian Handicrafts,” Craft Reader, pp. 192-199
W. R. Lethaby, “Art and Workmanship,” The Craft Reader, pp. 161-163
Soetsu Yanagi, “The Way of Craftsmanship,” The Craft Reader, pp. 167-176
Octavio Paz, “Seeing and Using: Art and Craftsmanship,” Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (Harcourt, 1987): 50-65
PAPER PROPOSAL DUE!
So you'd like to know more...
Stephen Bayley, "A Society That Has Forgotten How to Make Things Is in Grave Danger," (2011)
C. B. Fethe, “Craft and Art: A Phenomenological Distinction,” British Journal of Aesthetics (1977)
Session 9. Mar 20. The Core of Craft
Larry Shiner, “Blurred Boundaries? Rethinking the Concept of Craft and Its Relation to Art and Design,” Philosophy Compass (2012): 230-244
David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship, chs. 1-4, pp. 17-55
Pye, Nature and Art of Workmanship, ch. 11, pp. 127-139
Richard Sennett, “Resistance and Ambiguity,” The Craftsman, pp. 214-240
So you'd like to know more...
"U. S. Army farrier Charles Morrison Shoes a Horse," from the documentary series Craft in America (2014)
Session 10. Mar 27. Skilled Work. (1) What Is It? What Is Its Value? (2) Is Its Display Always Honest Craft?
Peter Dormer, "What Is Craft Knowledge?" The Art of the Maker (Thames and Hudson, 1994): 10-24
Richard Sennett, “Quality-driven Work,” The Craftsman, pp. 241-268
Matthew B. Crawford, “Thinking as Doing,” “Work, Leisure, and Full Engagement” Shop Class as Soulcraft, pp. 161-197
Peter Dormer, "Learning a Craft," The Art of the Maker (Thames and Hudson, 1994): 40-57
So you'd like to know more...
David Pye, "Techniques. Skill," The Nature and Aesthetics of Design (Herbert, 1978): 43-57
Thomas Carson Mark, “On Works of Virtuosity,” Journal of Philosophy 77 (1980)
Harry Braverman, “A Final Note on Skill,” Labor and Monopoly Capital (Monthly Review, 1974): 294-310
Session 11. Apr 3. Quarrels over Good Design. (1) What Is Design? (2) How Important Is Function to a Design's Quality? (3)
David Pye, "Art and Science [The Definition of Design and the Role that Function Plays in It]," Nature and Aesthetics of Design (Herbert, 1978): 11-20
David Pye, “The six requirements for design,” The Nature and Aesthetics of Design (Herbert, 1978): 23-35
Pye, “We can wish for impossibilities,” “The requirements conflict,” The Nature and Aesthetics of Design, pp. 66-76
Glenn Parsons, "Fact and Function in Architectural Criticism," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69 (2011): 21-29
Jane Forsey, “The Beauty of Design,” The Aesthetics of Design (Oxford UP, 2013): 181-192.
So you'd like to know more...
About the many functions design can fulfill: see this podcast on unpleasant design.
Session 12. Apr 10. (1) Materials: (i) The Unintended Consequence of Wanting Good (i.e., Expensive?) Ones. (ii) Does Respecting the Materials
Require Always Presenting them As They Are Before Joined with Others? (2) The Value of Durable Goods, the Value of Ephemeral Goods
Adolf Loos, “Building Materials,” The Craft Reader, pp. 115-119
David Pye, “Equivocality [Truth to Materials and the Qualities of Surfaces],” The Nature and Art of Workmanship, pp. 45-59
Akos Moravansky, “ ‘Truth to Material’ vs ‘The Principle of Cladding’: The Language of Materials in Architecture,” AA Files 31 (1996): 39-46
David Pye, “Diversity,” “Durability,” The Nature and Art of Workmanship, pp. 33-44.
Yuriko Saito, “Appearance of Ageing [and Ephemerality],” Everyday Aesthetics (Oxford UP, 2007 ): 173-204
So you'd like to know more...
-About the modernist architectural school obsessed with finding a material that was brutally honest and never makes you think it is something else. That school is brutalism, and its preferred material is
concrete. See Martin Filler, "The Brutal Dreams that Came True," New York Review of Books (22 Dec 2016)
-About a material that's currently in fashion for kitchens: granite. See Tim Carter, "You may love the clean look, but you'll be sorry if you install that granite countertop without a support," The Washington
Post (17 January 2017)
Session 13. Apr 17. (1) Elegance and Beauty: Their Natures and Their Values. (2) Is Craft a Luxury?
David Goldblatt, “Lightness and Fluidity: Remarks concerning the Aesthetics of Elegance,” Architectural Design (Jan/Feb 2007): pp. 10-18
Roger Scruton, "Judging Beauty," Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2009); 1-33
Selections from Christopher Berry, “Luxury goods,” The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation (Cambridge UP, 1994), pp. 1-19, 38-42
So you'd like to know more...
Patrik Schumacher, “Arguing for Elegance,” Architectural Design (Jan/Feb 2007): pp. 28-37
Niccolo Guicciardini, "Newton on elegance, aesthetics and geometry in the 1670s" (How in geometry Newton, unlike Descartes, thought that theoretical elegance is more valuable than explanatory power)
Elaine Scarry, “On Beauty and Being Wrong,” On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton UP, 1999): 1-54
Roger Scruton, "Why Beauty Matters," BBC (2009)
Joseph Heath, “Veblen and American Social Criticism,” Oxford Handbook to American Philosophy
R. Steiner and J. Weiss, “Veblen Revised in the Light of Counter-Snobbery,” Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism 9 (1951): 263-268
"Neiman Marcus Sells Luxury Collard Greens for $66 Plus Shipping," NPR News (3 November 2016)
Part Five. Does Design Go Hand-in-Hand with Fashions and Craft with Traditions?
Session 14. Apr 24. (1) Are Fashions in Everything Necessary to Democracy? (2) Tradition: The Opposite of Fashion that Is Essential to Craft?
Anna Farennikova and Jesse Prinz, "What Makes Something Fashionable?" in Fashion - Philosophy for Everyone: Thinking with Style, ed. J. Wolfendale and J.
Kennett (Wiley, 2011): 15-30
Gilles Lipovetsky, “The Progressive Shifting of the Social,” The Empire of Fashion, pp. 226-240
Herbert Blumer, “Fashion: From Class Differentiation to Collective Selection,” Sociological Quarterly 10 (1969): 275-291
H. B. Acton, “Tradition and Some Other Forms of Order,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 53 (1952-3): pp. 3-9 ONLY
J. C. Nyiri, “Tradition and Practical Knowledge,” in Practical Knowledge: Outlines of a Theory of Traditions and Skills, ed. J. C. Nyiri and Barry Smith (Croom Helm,
1988): 17-37.
So you'd like to know more...
Gilles Lipovetsky, “Introduction,” The Empire of Fashion, pp. 3-12
Georg Simmel, “Fashion,” American Journal of Sociology 62 (1957): 541-558
David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary
So you'd like to know about fashions in architecture:
Witold Rybczynski, The Look of Architecture (Oxford UP, 2001)
FINAL PAPER DUE LAST DAY OF EXAMS AT 12 NOON.
ENVOI
Here are some books that many people have found useful in learning different crafts.
Kautilya, Arthashastra
Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric
Niccolo Macchiavelli, The Prince
Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics (Norton 1954)
Aaron Copland, What to Listen for in Music (1939; widely reprinted)
Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren, How to Read a Book (Touchstone 1972)
Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (Tarcher 2012)
Joseph Williams and Gregory Colomb, The Craft of Argument (Longman 2006)
Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People ( (1936; reprinted all over)
Umberto Eco, How to Write a Thesis (MIT Press, 2015)
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols; Or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer (reprinted all over; more of an extended illustration of how Nietzsche philosophizes with a hammer than a guidebook to doing it)
Witold Rybczynski, How Architecture Works: A Humanist's Toolkit (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013; more an explanation to laypeople of the elements of the architect's craft than a novice's guide to the craft)
Joseph Williams and Joseph Bizup, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace (many editions)