It follows not infrequently that the marks of
cheapness or commonness are accepted as definitive marks of
artistic unfitness, and a code or schedule of aesthetic
proprieties on the one hand, and of aesthetic abominations on the
other, is constructed on this basis for guidance in questions of
taste.
As has already been pointed out, the cheap, and therefore
indecorous, articles of daily consumption in modern industrial
communities are commonly machine products; and the generic
feature of the physiognomy of machine-made goods as compared with
the hand-wrought article is their greater perfection in
workmanship and greater accuracy in the detail execution of the
design. Hence it comes about that the visible imperfections of
the hand-wrought goods, being honorific, are accounted marks of
superiority in point of beauty, or serviceability, or both. Hence
has arisen that exaltation of the defective, of which John Ruskin
and William Morris were such eager spokesmen in their time; and
on this ground their propaganda of crudity and wasted effort has
been taken up and carried forward since their time. And hence
also the propaganda for a return to handicraft and household
industry. So much of the work and speculations of this group of
men as fairly comes under the characterization here given would
have been impossible at a time when the visibly more perfect
goods were not the cheaper.
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