Oscar Wilde: PEOPLE often talk as if there was an opposition between what is beautiful and what is useful. There is no opposition to beauty except ugliness: all things are either beautiful or ugly, and utility will be always on the side of the beautiful thing, because beautiful decoration is always on the side of the beautiful thing, because beautiful decoration is always an expression of the use you put a thing to and the value placed on it. No workman will beautifully decorate bad work, nor can you possibly get good handicraftsmen or workmen without having beautiful designs. <...>
That the beauty of life is a thing of no moment, I suppose few people would venture to assert. And yet most civilised people act as if it were of none, and in so doing are wronging both themselves and those that are to come after them. For that beauty which is meant by art is no mere accident of human life which people can take or leave, but a positive necessity of life if we are to live as nature meant us to, that is to say unless we are content to be less than men.
Do not think that the commercial spirit which is the basis of your life and cities here is opposed to art. Who built the beautiful cities of the world but commercial men and commercial men only? Genoa built by its traders, Florence by its bankers, and Venice, most lovely of all, by its noble and honest merchants.
http://www.burrows.com/founders/art.html
(This is what inspired our business name!)
At 09:30 AM 5/18/2005, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>I do not think it is capitalism per se - some of the ugliest creations were
>made under the Soviet style socialism.
What are some good examples? Chris? Peter? Thoughts on this?
<....> The plain
>and crude became beautiful.
I dunno. I kinda like shaker furniture and some of the stuff Mennonites create are quite beautiful. Not to mention the whole Arts and Crafts movement, "Once more let me try to make it clear that by art, instructed thinkers don't only mean pictures or quaint and curious things, or necessarily costly ones, certainly not luxurious ones. they mean worthy and complete workmanship by competent workmen."
Of course, it makes you wonder just how much any of this has to do with the things discussed here (published in 1913):
ART AND WORKMANSHIP
W. R. LETHABY
We have been in the habit of writing so lyrically of art and of the temperament of the artist that the average man who lives in the street, sometimes a very mean street, is likely to think of it as remote and luxurious, not "for the likes of him." There is the danger in habitual excess of language that the plain man is likely to be frightened by it. It may be feared that much current exposition of the place and purpose of art only widens the gap between it and common lives.
A proper function of criticism should be to foster our national arts and not to frighten timid people off with high-pitched definitions and far-fetched metaphors mixed with a flood of (as Morris said) "sham technical twaddle." It is a pity to make a mystery of what should most easily be understood. there is nothing occult about the thought that all things may be made well or made ill. A work of art is a well-made thing, that is all. It may be a well-made statue or a well-made chair, or a well-made book. Art is not a special sauce applied to ordinary cooking; it is the cooking itself if it is good. Most simply and generally art may be thought of as THE WELL-DOING OF WHAT NEEDS DOING. If the thing is not worth doing it can hardly be a work of art, however well it may be done. A thing worth doing which is ill done is hardly a thing at all.
Fortunately people are artists who know it not - bootmakers (the few left), gardeners and basketmakers, and all players of games. We do not allow shoddy in cricket or football, but reserve it for serious things like houses and books, furniture and funerals. http://www.burrows.com/art.html
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