Thanks for another great post Richard!

It always struck me as somewhat insincere that fine art was held up to the presumption of ‘pure contemplation’ while things like pots and architecture were denigrated as craft by the visceral engagement that follows them. Its as if something could only count as art if it had no possible use or utility. It seems a very Victorian prejudice against human sweat in favor of contemplative abstraction.

But the funny thing is that pots and architecture can also be contemplated. They can arouse all those emotions and aesthetic insight that you describe. They are not handicapped by also being functional. If anything, they have a dimension that transcends mere contemplation. Its not a case of subtraction by addition. They are not being artistically impaired by also being functional.

But the prejudice has very little to do with logic or consistency. And much like what you suggest about the proscriptions against sentimentality, the proscription against function has the ring of advocacy for a particular self interest. The lies become myth, and myth becomes truth, the longer and more convincingly we tell it….

When ever I am aware of being told to sit at the back of the bus my suspicions are raised. Society has these roles marked out, and there are all sorts of rules to the different games. That they are there does not make them right. There is always a difference between ‘is’ and ‘ought’. So what I often see as the root of so many of our prejudices is that we have stopped being curious about that part of the world. We have stopped collecting new evidence that things out there are still a mystery. We have settled on an answer rather than still feeling challenged.

And the Art Game and the Gender Game are simply two of many insidious performances we undertake. And whatever small kernels of truth they might be built on, the ad hoc justifications and extrapolations of rules quite often fail to live up to their native virtues. Sure, men and women ARE different in many ways. But that doesn’t mean that only women are gardeners or men intellectuals. Sure, pots are different from paintings, but not all pots suffer when put on a pedestal, and not all paintings fail when used as place mats….

The really interesting thing is that we so often take these qualities to somehow be inherent, and not simply a circumstantial matter of how they are embedded in our lives. Paintings and sculpture are no more innately worthy of contemplation than pots. Its only by habit and accident of culture that we make that pronouncement. And likewise men no less capable of sentiment than women. If we are simply used to dispensing our unthinking prejudice throughout the world, what else would we expect? Open minded curiosity? In the end, we reap what we sow, and we sleep in the bed we make…..

Thank you so much for your considerate response! Sorry it took so long to get back to you. I have tried to track you down outside these comments, but it appears that the link to ‘your’ website on this blog has been taken over by someone pushing e-cigarettes and essays about the college life. Yikes!

Anyway, I am still hoping there will be a change in the fortunes of mainstream publishing and that your other books will soon be available to us. In the meantime I am curious if you have explored the newer avenues of e-publishing and self publishing. I don’t know much about either option, and I’m not likely to ever own a kindle, but I would be willing to pay for a downloadable pdf version or even an individually printed copy from a place like blurb.com

I worry that the financial disaster surrounding us is not only making life harder but is removing a certain amount of quality and intelligence from our grasp. It would be a shame if no one but you, Christa, and your editor got to see these final letters and your other collections of essays.

I encourage you to explore these options.

Good luck!

Hope all is well!

Carter

Thank you for the kind words regarding my North Carolina blogs. We fully agree that it is a remarkable place and one of the greatest concentration of ceramic art in the world. If you ever make it to the West Coast, please visit my home and pottery gallery. We have lots and lots of North Carolina pottery here. I went to your own blog and viewed and very much enjoyed your work and comments. Best of everything in the future.

Richard

Thank you for your positive words about my North Carolina Blog. I am also sorry we didn’t get a chance to meet during my recent visit but I have every intention of visiting North Carolina and Seagrove in particular sometime again in the future. You are quite right – I am not only a collector of pottery but in my writing try to be an advocate for potters and pottery. Your pot looks great in my pottery gallery. I put it on the back wall where I have floor to ceiling book shelves and put some of my recent North Carolina acquisitions in the empty spaces among the books. If you ever make it to the West Coast, please pay us a visit.

Take care,

Richard

I want to thank you again for your continued interest in my commentary on my blog. I am even more appreciative that you shared your thoughts about my comment with your friends on your own blog. Some potters want to limit their interests to basic technical stuff regarding the making of their pots. I have no problem with that but I think such limited focus leaves out a contextual richness of the aesthetic and intellectual aspects of what they are doing. In a way, it is part of the chronic modesty of the craftsperson – who too often think that what they do does not contain the metaphorical ability to move and inform people beyond function. I looked over your blog and see that you were once a philosophy major at a university. I do not believe that professional philosophy has a monopoly on ideas either but a love of reflecting on the meaning of things and ideas is evident in your writing. We all can try to make sense of our daily lives and what we do with those lives and find our own original meaning. That kind of empowerment motivated my forty years in the classroom.

Well, now that I got that off my chest I will like to turn to your comments. You start off by responding to my feelings and thoughts about collecting pottery where I quote the German Romantic poet Schiller and his thoughts about that desire of acquisition embedded in our behavior. You mentioned that this quote, in my 46th letter to Christa Assad, was not in my book. You are quite right. Only 40 of my 75 letters to Christa were published in the book in 2007. I planned to have the second volume of letters published a year or two later but that never happened. My publisher in Britain was impacted by the serious economic recession evident in both America and Britain and it never happened. This has been quite frustrating for me. I had received very good reviews in leading ceramic periodicals in Australia, Britain and the US and a very good response from potters all over the world. In addition to the bad economic times, books, as I am sure you know, are being transformed in non-object status through electronic appliances such as Kindle. It is a very difficult time for writer right now. I now have, aside from the 2nd volume of letters to Christa, one volume of letters to William Morris, the 19th century English Arts & Crafts leader, two volumes of letters to Walter Benjamin, the Jewish/German cultural critic of the early 20th century, and I am now almost finished with the first volume of letters to Octavio Pax, the Mexican poet of the last half of the 20th century. I hope to locate an interested publisher in either Britain or the US but so far have been unsuccessful. I am sorry I took so long in explaining that but it does impact my morale but so far hasn’t influenced my motivation to write. Writing almost six books in my seventies (78 last month) isn’t too bad for an old man.

Let me get back to your comments and the issue of the relationship between the ability to acquire art and the capacity to benefit from its beauty. We agree they are two different things. I have tried to hone my ability to encounter and engage art as a life long mission. I am still working on it. I like your identification of all the beautiful things we can enjoy during our lives that are available and do not cost us anything – the sunset, the smell of coffee in the morning, a mathematical proof (I am afraid not for me) and the microscopic view of a dust mite. I have been exploring the recent literature on the “aesthetic of everyday life” because I, along with you, do not think we should reserve our celebration of beauty for those special events when we go to a museum or art gallery.

I fully concur that beauty is integral to the experience of our species while consumerism is a much later manifestation of a particular economic and industrial organization of society. Judy, my wife gave me a big, beautiful book for Christmas “The Art Museum”, a huge, heavy book that contains images of art from every corner of the globe from the Ice Age to contemporary art. It starts with the cave paintings and the text declares these magnificent images of great aesthetic beauty. Art is indeed our documentation of what you stated in your blog – “In as much as we are guided by the things we believe in we are also guided by our appreciation of beauty. In as much as we are creatures of desire we also desire beauty.”

I find your commentary most supportive throughout your blog. I was never a rich man – just a schoolteacher. I never sought great material wealth and preferred collecting prints and pottery to getting a swimming pool, a big car and a house higher on the hill. I never thought about collecting as a financial investment and I never sought trophy pieces (which I could not afford anyway) for that reason. I think some friends and family members think that I am not of this world – naive and alien to the central impulses that fuel the appetites and behavior of those around me. To love beauty can bring a form of alienation and certainly a kind of nonconformity as compared to others in my neighborhood.

I just wanted you to know, Carter, how much I appreciate your willingness to respond to my thoughts. I do want to note not only the subtlety and complexity of your ideas but the rich use of language you use to express them. It doesn’t seem fair to me that some makers can use words with the same skill and imagination they use with clay. I have a far more restricted talent but I do love language and the ways it can be used to make the engagement of reading also an aesthetic as well as intellectual experience.

I wish you the very best in the future and your continued love and efforts in making beautiful things.

Your friend,

Richard

I just received your response to my blog comments on North Carolina pottery. I hope you have a great experience at Penland.

I went to your blog and enjoyed reading about your activities as a ceramic artist. Laguna just put my third blog on Seagrove and the NC area on my blog. I always take great delight in traveling there, and of course bringing back some great pottery.

I noticed that you have Christa Assad listed on your blog. Perhaps you know – but I wrote letters to her over five years – forty of which make up my book, “Searching for Beauty: Letters from a Collector to a Studio Potter”. It is available from Laguna/Axner if interested. I would like to invite you, if you get down to Southern California, to visit my home and pottery gallery. I have over 1,000 ceramic artifacts in my home, collected over the last thirty-five years – antique, contemporary, indigenous,
studio art, 19th century industrial, etc.

I do appreciate it when people take the trouble to contact me about my blog comments, as I am sure you do. Thank you again for responding.

Richard Jacobs

Thanks for another wonderful post! I’m glad you finally got to meet Bruce and Samantha. They seem like such lovely people! I feel like I already know them from reading the fun and quirky posts they share on their blog, and I hope to make the trip up there one day to meet them in person.

I was really intrigued by the part of this post that was from your 46th letter to Christa. Your book does not seem to include it, but I was interested in seeing what else you might have to say on the topic. I’m not entirely sure I understand everything you are getting at here, and I have to admit that my familiarity with Schiller is wanting.

What I think you are asking is whether we can fully separate a pursuit of beauty from “the raw lust of consumerism” (I’m a bit slow sometimes, so please forgive my lack of comprehension of the obvious….). As you point out, the ability to acquire a thing is independent of that person’s ability to appreciate it, so purchasing an art object does not actually mean that it was, is now, or ever will be seen for the beauty it possesses. It can be, but that means something more than merely the powers of acquisition.

To see the beauty requires a native talent, aptitude, and perhaps some previous exposure or education. And so it seems like the appreciation of beauty is also a faculty that has no natural bounds. More things are appreciated for their beauty than we are able to put a price tag on or round up in our vaults and troves. The beauty of a shadow dappled evening, the glorious cloud spangled sunset, an ephemeral scent of coffee in the morning, a smile that lights up and then is gone, a mathematical proof, a microscopic view of a dust mite…. All these things require an insight into that special feature of our world that can be summed up as the appreciation of beauty.

So it seems more likely that not only is seeing beauty independent of the concerns of consumerism, but it is also prior to them as well. I once discussed this with an anthropologist friend of mine, and it was her feeling that the function of beauty has been with the human race throughout most of our evolution as an intelligent life form. And consumerism is, after all, only a recent manifestation, and perhaps only an accident of certain cultures. Seeing beauty, on the other hand, is a fundamental truth of what it means to be human.

Beauty is how we decide between things, what we like and what we don’t. It divides the world for us. It is the description we have given to those things about the world that we are drawn to. It separates the world into the sacred and the profane. We don’t need to look to find the value of beauty because the value is implicated in the description. Beauty PRESUPPOSES value. It has a normative function, almost akin to a moral imperative. And the difficulty of putting a price on it has relatively insignificant bearing on beauty’s place in the human drama. Beauty is simply everywhere. We find it at the loftiest peaks and in the humblest hovels. In as much as we are guided by the things we believe in we are also guided by our appreciation of beauty. In as much as we are creatures of desire we also desire beauty. This goes for rich and for poor. It is a human need, so that includes everybody. It is in no way attendant upon one’s purchasing power. It is only an elitism of culture that disguises this.

You ask the question: “Do I dare claim that my acquisition of pottery is somehow a more noble impulse than those who prefer to do their shopping at Wal-Mart or Target? Is not the raw lust of consumerism behind all such activities?” Obviously for some it is, and the purchase of an object has no more meaning than a momentary impulse or evidence of a spending addiction. For others the value is no more than an object’s simple function, and even art can be seen more for its apparent function or role that it plays than an inherent beauty.

This is no more obvious than in institutions where the value of beauty has been superseded by monetary worth. At the high end where the most dollars are spent on art it often even comes down to merely the reputation of the artist. Sometimes collectors are guilty of looking at the maker as the only qualifying factor, and the object itself seems almost irrelevant. It is not being purchased from an appreciation of its beauty, its value as something beautiful, but from its worth as an example of this particular artist. Sometimes owning a Da Vinci is more important for its prestige than for the fact of having been blown away by its beauty or hearing the angels speak. It becomes a commodity for all intents and purposes, something mundane and emotionally torpid.

As you put it at the end of your quote, “Without beauty, is not consumerism… finally a state of ‘exhausted desire’?” Things of beauty are as liable as anything else to becoming commodities. But what a thing is ‘worth’ is not always the same as what its value is. Can you put a price on yesterday’s sunset, the difference between two smiles and three? Stripped of outside values like beauty, “The desire of acquisition, ‘restless and plagued by imperious want’” can sometimes look darn near circular, possessing for the mere sake of possessing (or the future promise of trading up, and possessing something more). Things with even outstanding commercial worth can sometimes be notoriously skimpy on value outside the capacity for actual transaction. A piece of paper, some ones and zeros in a computer….

An appreciation of beauty, on the other hand, speaks directly to our animal soul. This object has this effect on us, moves us with admiration and transports us. The appreciation of beauty gives wings to our imagination. We hear the angels sing. And so the quest to surround ourselves with beautiful things is probably as old as the human race. Older perhaps. Beauty does not need to be defended for its role in the games we play with money. Beauty underlies much of what we do and often transcends it.

Like most other things with value, beauty can also be used to serve the human capacity for greed. But its appearance in the machinations of greed do not define it. Worth does not simply translate into value, value into worth. “The raw lust of consumerism” defines the pursuit of beauty no more than the intimacies of love are defined by venal carnality and ‘the oldest profession in the world’. Even the most sublime manifestations of the human spirit can be bartered away and dragged through the soil of tawdry human negligence and misuse.

The truth is that we appreciate beauty all around us and every day of our adult lives. And quite often we are responsible for adding to the things and moments of beauty that sustain the world. We spread joy and laughter as the natural manifestation of our person. We add beauty to the lives of others simply through the kindness and gentleness of our creative souls. Only occasionally are we moved to pay for it. But that’s not a bad thing. Sometimes beauty is worth paying for. There is no need for apologies.

At least that’s my wayward take on things…. Thanks for your thought provoking post!