The all-new Art and Craft movement

Back in the late 19th century, after the first real expansion in education for the people and the related change in society in Western cultures brought about by the industrial revolution, artists began to notice that the level of quality of things like furniture and furnishings had risen so much it was rivalling what they were producing, and what is worse, all those oiky-factory owners were now able to not only pump out vast quantities of similar, good quality goods, but a whole range of items. Ever wondered why Victorian homes were just bursting with fabric, wallpapers, furniture and the like? No, not as the usual pundits have it, because the Victorians lacked taste but, all of a sudden, they didn't have to be in the aristocracy to have a comfy home. Of course, if you were poor, you were still going to have to wait for another century before you could join in.

So, imagine that you were a painter and had been brought up in an art tradition that focussed on replication, and you have spent years learning about how to paint someone in a realistic manner. That's what artists were for, producing likenesses of real people and scenes from history or religion. Imagine, then, what happened when someone with a wooden box could come along and take a chemical image of your potential client, and then get a craftsman to add paint to the resulting image? What is worse is that they could reproduce these chemical 'photograph' images any number of times, and even print on paint using a machine, so that 'paintings' could be produced on a production line. How much art was then left in your reproduction skill?

Having competition can be a good thing as it helps people to realise that they cannot remain sitting on their bottoms while other people in the world live second class lives. When you see your own livelihood drying up because someone else has put the work into giving the customers a better choice, it forces you to re-evaluate your own product. And artists did, they realised what they could offer was originality, a product that had passed through human hands and contained that human's own input visible in the result, and so was born the Arts and Crafts movement. Even today, many people are prepared to pay extra for a product with the human touch. Sadly, the artists in the Arts and Crafts movement rather missed the point, because they really beat up the reputation of factory products, with the result that huge numbers of people today in the media still trash the reputation of factory goods - while typing on computers, talking on mobile phones and generally living lifestyles that would be impossible without the comfort of technology and the factories which make it possible.

Hence, it is time for a new movement, the Art-Craft movement, but this time instead of having the purpose of beating up the opposition, it will embrace it. We are looking for a quality win:win, and no matter if you are a roadsweeper, fashion designer, business person, painter (either kind) or university don, you are going to discover the art and craft in your life and work.