The Craft Reader

Adamson, G., (Ed), (2010), The Craft Reader, New York: Berg.

Page 2

With the onset of the industrial revolution in the late eighteenth century craft began to suffer...the arts and craft movement , emerged to rescue it. .....First craft skill was ... not simply eroded as a result of industrialization. Rather, it has been continually transformed,

Describing craft as an art form,....disguises the otherwise obvious  ...  the potential radicality of craft’s non-art status.
craftivism 

Page 325

The focus of his critique shifted from machine as villain to the perversity of a system of manufacture that reduced the worker to an unthinking, unfeeling drone. For Ruskin, the principle error of contemporary society resided in its tacit presumption that the consuming pleasure of the few justified the dehumanisation of the many.

“Art is the operation of the hand and intelligence of man together.”

“Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together”

Page 326

“craft was something of a higher calling, for it was the real art of the people.” affordable

P 437

In the modernist view, design supersedes craft as a historical stage. Through informed effort and precise methodology design is able to guide mechanical work and render it superior even to handwork ... ‘art as a pure intellectual exercise.

Imperfections and deviations came to be seen as legitimating characteristics. The historical roles are reversed – perfect machine work is depicted as bad and imperfect handwork as good.

Craft is eventually cornered into a position of terminal nostalgia or, worse, of elitism. Via a notion of consumer exclusivity.expencive

Small-batch production and even one-offs are now feasible in many industrial settings ---(computer aided design etc..) bespoke 

P 330

“Craft is not primarily an individual experience, but a collective one.” community projects

P331

At heart, craft aims for a type of creativity that is universal and pervasive. ... the fact that craft has come to be seen as a mainly personal, even solitary, activity is perplexing indeed.

The old paradigm of mass production is on its way out: a new paradigm, the individuation of experience, arises in its place.

Some time way back around the sixteenth century, craft and industry were synonyms, both capable of denoting the idea of skill. Now that industry is in the process of reinventing itself, perhaps design and craft will become synonyms too: complementary aspects of the same ongoing process of shaping experience through the interaction between people and things.

P 389

“every kind of capitalist production....” writes Marx, “has this in common, that it is not the workman that employs the instrument of labour, but the instrument of labour that employs the workman. .....”

The hand....is made redundant by technological advances.unemployment

P390

The modern person only works at what can be abbreviated. mechanised ?

P392

Craft as mode of activity translates into craft as a power, an obscure power, nestling in the imaginatively conceived object. craftivism