• buy handmade this holiday season

    There are plenty of reasons to buy only handmade gifts this holiday season, chief among them that handmade objects have more soul & personality than even the finest machine-made mass-produced goods. Of course, there are also environmental and social reasons: money stays in the craftperson’s community, and doesn’t (as often) go into the coffers of WalTargetMartEtc. or another international conglomerate that cares not at all about its customers or the quality of the products it sells. From buyhandmade.com:

    Buying Handmade makes for better gift-giving.

    The
    giver of a handmade gift has avoided the parking lots and long lines of
    the big chain stores in favor of something more meaningful. If the
    giver has purchased the gift, s/he feels the satisfaction of supporting
    an artist or crafter directly. The recipient of the handmade gift
    receives something that is one-of-a-kind, and made with care and
    attention that can be seen and touched. It is the result of skill
    and craftsmanship that is absent in the world of large-scale
    manufacturing.

    Buying handmade is better for people.

    The
    ascendancy of chain store culture and global manufacturing has left us
    dressing, furnishing, and decorating alike. We are encouraged to be
    consumers, not producers, of our own culture. Our ties to the local and
    human sources of our goods have been lost. Buying handmade helps us
    reconnect.

    Buying handmade is better for the environment.

    The
    accumulating environmental effects of mass production are a major cause
    of global warming and the poisoning of our air, water and soil. Every
    item you make or purchase from a small-scale independent artist or
    crafter strikes a small blow to the forces of mass production.

    There are plenty of ways to do this. Visit one of the many hundreds of folks selling their wares on etsy.com, for instance, or your local artists’ guild, or contact a local community or technical college and find out who your neighborhood’s cabinetmakers and furniture carpenters are. Either way, down with plastic and up with real gifts!

  • Tokyo’s Nihon Mingeikan & Mingei’s relationship to Arts & Crafts

    Japan’s Daily Yomiuri includes an English-language edition, and a recent issue includes a short article by Robert Reed on Tokyo’s Nihon Mingeikan, a small museum celebrating Mingei crafts and the life and work of Soetsu Yanagi, the founder of the Mingei movement. Mingei is sometimes associated with the Arts & Crafts movement by art historians who note both its chronological proximity to European A&C and its similar philosophical underpinnings (the recent International Arts & Crafts show, which originated at the Victoria & Albert and was at San Francisco’s De Young Museum in the middle of 2006, included a model room based on Mingei crafts and made a strong case for that movement’s inclusion as part of the ‘International Arts & Crafts’ milieu).

    From the museum’s website:

    Located
    in Tokyo, the Mingeikan Museum is housed in a beautiful traditional
    Japanese building completed in 1936. Founded in the same year, the
    Mingeikan has over 17,000 items in its collection made by anonymous crafts people mainly from Japan, but also from China, Korea, England, Africa, and elsewhere.

    Yanagi Soetsu
    (1889-1961), the first director and founder of the Museum, coined the
    term Mingei (folk art) in 1926 to refer to common crafts that had been
    brushed aside by the industrial revolution. Yanagi and his lifelong companions,
    the potters Bernard Leach, Hamada Shoji, and Kawai Kanjiro, sought to
    counteract the desire for cheap mass-produced products by pointing to
    the works of ordinary crafts people that spoke to the spiritual and
    practical needs of life. The Mingei Movement is responsible for keeping alive many traditions.