Tuesday, January 2, 2007
SoulCraft
This article was recommended by David Brooks as one of the year's best magazine pieces. It's a bit abstract, academized, but the points by the writer, Michael B. Crawford, are well-taken and the conclusions surprising. The writer was a think-tank drone who tired of the work and opened a motorcycle repair shop, which was much more satisfying. (It's surprising think-tank work could be so soulless — Crawford doesn't explain.) He feels the loss of connection to the hands-on crafts is a serious loss — a cognitive loss, because he feels that crafts engender invention and independence.
These are arguments very sympathetic to someone like myself who creates paintings. Picasso said, “You do it with your hands.” That is indeed a power of art — in addition to the claims of cognitive value; art comes from the living body and if well done, has the pulse and breath of the artist. True art forms circle that connection between creator and audience; they speak comprehensively to the human condition — to the agency of consciousness. Art is craft made conscious.
The arts contain the human spirit and are the best vehicle for that soul-speech that boring, empty pop culture can't sate; movies, photos, teevee, “digital” art, prepackaged sampled music, all produced from mechanical contrivance — at a distance and with predetermined templates at their core; as Crawford notes: the knowledge workers are themselves being stripped of their cognitive value as systems are designed to have a small elite know while the others simply do as worker ants — mental factory work. You have to read the article to grok Crawford's reasoning but it makes sense to me.
…Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena are more able to lay down principles such as to admit of a wide and coherent development; while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations.