craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality

haha. I know somebody who used to work at LV, she said pretty much all of the materials - the leather, gold zippers and clasps, chains, etc. are made in china and shipped to italy/france to be assembled.

this is gonna turn into another quiddities of the ruling class-stylee thread, isn't it?!?

insofar as most of us probably think ppl should be able to produce, sell, and buy what they want then no

― call all destroyer, Thursday, November 3, 2011 7:18 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

haha. u sure that "most of us" do?

Dayo, that's probably part of why Hermes (competing against LV) was bringing in their folks to do this demonstration. They all work in the same place:

haha. u sure that "most of us" do?

― max, Thursday, November 3, 2011 7:24 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

that seems to be an assumption most ppl itt are operating under!

the cultural objection to this stuff is, i think, some kind of instinctual reaction to its ancientness. if working this way (and buying this way) is a reaction to capitalism or industrialization, it "feels" less like a way forward than a reach back even further to aristocratic patronage of craftspeople.

so, rather than stamping out parts for something that everyone buys (to the great profit of a few), you're handmaking some object that the greatly-profited few are buying directly.

this all sounds pretty marxy i guess.

nah, you don't say

well i don't really share the objection, but that's my expert diagnosis of it *straightens bow tie*

is that bow tie hand stitched, good sir

that seems to be an assumption most ppl itt are operating under!

― call all destroyer, Thursday, November 3, 2011 7:30 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i dunno, ilx as a place seems kinda hostile to this kind of thing, see for example the nyt quiddities thread, or remys posts here

i know! that's why this thread it weird.

seems like remy's posts invited more disagreement than i expected

maybe people are annoyed by it because it seems like a symptom of the insane fractal inequality we're dealing with, rather than a solution to it?

i'm making big assumptions as to the buying audience for these things btw. seems like a mishmash of "ethical consumers" and "really rich people" -- i dunno what a venn diagram of these sets would look like tbh.

"in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, crochet after dinner"

http://images.unurthed.com/Vandenbroeck-geometry-circle-83.jpg

xp

http://6.freshlikedougie.net/files/2011/02/Kanye-West.jpeg

xp

[this] has happened several times in the last 150-odd years, ever since morris and ruskin: awareness of it falls in and out of art history -- it's obviously on a big upswing at the moment (others were the 70s, the 20s and the 1880s), but all the exact same issues swirl around

how the hell do we get off this appalling roundabout(*)

(*)carousel

http://thisismadebyhand.com/shoppe

That stuff could kit out Arcade Fire when they're on holiday.

I wasn't aiming for this to be another quid-ag or suburbs thread metastasis exactly.

What made me start the thread is I genuinely think it's pretty rad that Beardy the Knifemaker is doing his thing and apparently sustaining and growing his business. For him personally, it must be exciting to get to make things every day and have that be what pays for rent and food. His workshop is even perhaps accruing a benefit to the community by being a place where other folks can come learn about knives and cutting skills (cutting up vegetables is not a natural skill) and maybe a couple folks could be employed or apprenticed.

But what I get stuck on is still the pricing. When global manufacturing concerns drive down costs of things like quality knives, that's got some benefits, in that everyone who cooks regularly can get some decent knives. Yadda yadda industrial revolution assembly line cars vacations America. Whatever the good and bad sides of that context (other threads for that), when he sells the knives for that much into that middle class economy, then that seems to lean more in the direction of Damien Hirst selling bad paintings to Russian oligarchs than, say, the microbrewery movement, where products priced similarly to and competitive with the "corporate" are sold into the local market etc.

Of course microbreweries are probably part of this conversation on some other level…

160 posts and none of you cunts got round to dismissing this shitty venture for its use of 'shoppe' alone

/it seems to me your primary complaint is with marketing language and the associated inability of people to make informed decisions based upon it/

It's more an argument with willfully deceptive (and often self-deceptive) self-definition. I can go out tomorrow and hang a shingle over a blanket in Harvard Square and sell tiles I've pornographically Sharpied and call myself a wandering artist in the tradition of Basquiet. I can even believe in my art, and maybe have some real raw talent for it. Maybe I'll get rich from it. Who knows? But the fact is that I'm /not/ a wandering artist in the same way as somebody who's spent twenty years at his trade, or in the same way I'll be in twenty years. It doesn't necessarily mean that I'm not an artist, or that my art is invalid or inauthentic. But if I set my prices at an ego-gratifying $500/tile, when there are tiles that are roughly as pornographic for $12, two blankets away I'm basically acting in an entitled, delusional and borderline-dishonest way. And even moreso if I induce customers to spend an extra $488 under the justification that there's some moral superiority to purchasing from me.
--turkey in the straw (x2) (remy bean)

you're implying that the real 'wandering artist' has some sort of authenticity that the pretend wandering artist doesn't. that itself is not a given! I mean you're attacking the authenticity trend by saying...it's not authentic enough. the only delusional people are those who think that the story behind the tile should significantly affect its value. on the macro level I think that's a weird cultural problem, on the micro level I think you're just picking on a small group of entrepreneurs for taking advantage of the exact same weird market dynamics that basically every major business attempts to take advantage of. people make irrational consumption decisions!

i'm not talking about authenticity at all. hence: It doesn't necessarily mean that I'm not an artist, or that my art is invalid or inauthentic.

i'm talking about experience.

you're just shifting words to mean the same general thing tho!

your uncle's x years of experience made buying from him better

vs

veteran authentic craftsman w/ x years of experience

'experience' is sold as authenticity by people who have it. it doesn't imply moral superiority or even better product. it usually has correlation w/ better product but not necessarily.

160 posts and none of you cunts got round to dismissing this shitty venture for its use of 'shoppe' alone

'x shoppe' vs 'purveyors of fine x' what is worse?

you're the one conflating 'experience' with 'authentic,' not me!

I am not naturally talented at painting and if I worked at it for 20 years I'd prob be better. doesn't mean that someone w/ one year of painting couldn't be much better than me.

experience is great, sure, but outside of what it adds to the product in inherent quality it's only useful as a claim toward 'authenticity'.

outside of what it adds to the product in inherent quality is really the nut of the argument i'm making. i could care less about authenticity; i'm too broke to even face that as a determining factor.

kirsty allsopp

grand designs, too

outside of what it adds to the product in inherent quality is really the nut of the argument i'm making. i could care less about authenticity; i'm too broke to even face that as a determining factor.

you're coming at this from the perspective that it's somehow possible for us to be rationalist machines making purchasing decisions based on nothing but inherent quality

but
a. we're not totally rationalist machines and we can't even theoretically make purchasing decisions like that
I was looking for an excuse to post this elsewhere: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/can-a-commercial-be-too-sexy-for-its-own-good-ask-axe/246863/ - that's how the target/walmart/whatever shoppers you're defending are making their purchasing decisions. it's no more or less bizarre tham people at our stereotype of a williamsburg artisanal shop or whatever.
b. there's no such thing as inherent quality a significant % of the time, lots of gray zones
c. asymmetric information always gonna exist. w/ the assumption that your uncle made better things than the other dude - do you think the people who bought from the other dude honestly knew enough about the object that they were buying an inferior quality good? do you think they were being totally rational and thought "well this is slightly worse, but the fact that it's recycled/'authentic'/whatever makes up for it"? no way, their decision making process involved varying amounts of information and emotion and the other dude was better at manipulating the information and their emotions.

it sucks! but what you're arguing for isn't socialism it's hyper-robot-capitalism.

all that said you and I are prob pretty similar consumers, I bought $10 jeans from uniqlo this week and that is exactly as much money as I want to spend on jeans. but overall this is nothing new or even particularly different about this trend. and prob overall a good thing w/ the assumption that it creates jobs and gets people to consume fewer things and more slowly. that's the bigger question for me - is this trend making people more attached to physical objects or just more conscious of their use value?

"about the object that they were buying an inferior quality good? "
=
"about the object that they knew they were buying an inferior quality good?

I think there's a funny tension for a lot of people with this stuff -- on one hand you have the idea that there's some moral bad in paying a lot of money for an object -- it seems gross, even idolatrous. On the other hand there's something morally bad about this big capitalist monster system that mass produces things while, you imagine, whipping its chinese workers and polluting the earth.

I sort of decided in the last few years that my own instinctive reaction against things just because they seem more expensive than other things in their category is false -- it actually makes better sense to pay more for the pair of jeans that, theoretically, will look good longer. Otherwise, you wind up buying more stuff, which (1) winds up being expensive anyway and (2) uses more resources.

At the same time, the trends being discussed in this thread kind of go beyond just better quality for higher price. I feel like maybe we already talked about this some in another thread, but I'm really irked by a lot of these "well-made" coats and shirts that are obviously too fashion-sensitive (and worn by too-fashion-sensitive people) to actually last more than a season. It's a classic example of worshipping the idea of something while discarding its purpose.

Also a lot of these products are just expensive beyond the added quality, so that you aren't actually making a financially savvy decision. Not that that should be the only consideration, obviously.

and assuming you're in any position to judge the quality/durability at purchase

it actually makes better sense to pay more for the pair of jeans that, theoretically, will look good longer. Otherwise, you wind up buying more stuff, which (1) winds up being expensive anyway and (2) uses more resources.

"I'm too poor to buy cheap stuff" has always been my motto

i'm too poor to buy expensive stuff, tbh

TBF my one pair of jeans is in fact Uniqlo. It actually seems pretty well made to me, idk. Sometimes you can tell, or at least you know something from prior purchases. I wear dress shirts every day to work, and I know from experience, for example, that if you wait for the big winter sale, Brooks Brothers no-iron shirts are absolutely worth the premium you pay over your standard department store shirt, because they stay fresh looking for much longer, retain their shape, etc. That's not really the kind of "craftsmanship" discussed in the thread title exactly -- I'm sure they're made in some chinese factory but just with better materials, better design, more stitching and maybe better trained workers.

darragh raises a decent point -- how can a consumer actually make an independent assessment as to a product's quality? and i don't think we can easily equate quality with durability. the infamous fancy axes are a good illustration of this. how can you tell whether those luxury tools are more or less durable or practical than their mass-produced equivalent? i don't know if you can! what i'm getting at, is that I think judging an object's 'quality' is a highly aesthetic evaluation.

TBF my one pair of jeans is in fact Uniqlo. It actually seems pretty well made to me, idk.

assembled in China of Japanese denim and Chinese sundries fwiw.

those axes will no doubt remain in excellent condition for a very long time! but just because they will rarely be put to use, not because of their inherent 'quality'

Gommorrah (the book) actually talks about how the Chinese textile industry is increasingly learning how to make things really well

sure - you can't put all that IP in the country and not expect them to copy it or reverse-engineer it!

Guys this is a great thread but I want you all to watch this for a few minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfN4_52loC4

this is really easy to run into if you buy liquor these days--microdistilleries are popping up all over the place and using words like "local" "artisinal" and "craft" and they pretty much ignore some basic facts of the beverage alcohol industry (liquor branch in particular), such as 1) distilling is really hard; 2) once you can do it it's really easy to do large-scale; 3) market competition and consumer choice have resulted in an environment where 95% of midshelf and higher products are quite high-quality.

I think the term "local" stands a bit apart from "artisinal" and "craft". The latter two terms can sometimes just be clever marketing, or a misleading implication of quality, but if we're talking about a locally distilled product made with locally-sourced ingredients, that's a bit different. Some people are happy to pay a bit more for something if they're supporting a local business. I think the increased interest in supporting small/local/craft businesses is partly due to a desire to live in a more self-sustaining, neighborhood sort of economy, where we can grow and make and buy a lot of the things we need/want without the raw ingredients, processed components, and finished products having to be shipped halfway across the world three different times.

And if you buy that locally distilled liquor, you're probably supporting several local businesses, not just one. There's the distiller, the farmer, the maltster, the barrelmaker, the local shops that proudly carry the local product- I could go on and on. These community businesses all depend on each other, (hopefully) treat each other well, and share in the rewards of the enterprise.

And then of course there's the idea that you're giving your money to a known entity, a person, and not some shadowy corporation using unfair business practices, and paying their employees the bare minimum, and making horrific political contributions, etc. This is of course a sweeping generalization but that's part of the mindset at play here, I think.

the local distiller could still be getting all his grain from global sources, you don't know that

Right but I was talking specifically about "a locally distilled product made with locally-sourced ingredients."

artisanal moonshine

My point was that the decision of whether to support a local distiller is not solely based on whether the midshelf mass-produced product is of equal quality.

i sold a book on canning/preserving and a how-to moonshine book to a dude last week. the revolution will be pickled.

feel like a lot of these products' 'rustic' quality is more like a 'hey mommy look what I made in arts and crafts today!' quality