I am looking at bowls and I’m rather confused. My only real requirement is that they should be usable for putting nuts in and placed on a table. So my bewilderment comes not from the task at hand but from the layout of the store I’m in.
On the one hand I find well made inexpensive bowls with interesting patterns and motifs. On the other I find… er… something else entirely.
Apparently the bowls here are categorized as rustic style.
Rustic style. Hmm… does ‘rustic’ not mean crude, unfinished and artless?
If so I must say they rather nailed it.
A hideously expensive vase begins with the description: “A stunning German vase with a structured surface of blue and black.”
What would be quite bloody stunning is if anyone actually buys it. This “structured surface” looks roughly like the remains of the paint job on my car after it had been sideswiped by a truck.
Though, as the note goes further by extolling its virtues as, among other things, being “very heavy” perhaps the stunning part is meant literally. I could easily see someone stunning the maker by bludgeoning the hell out of him with the vase.
I finally realize what has happened. The philistines are to be lured into purchasing the good looking and well made stuff while the proper connoisseurs will go to this other section for hand crafted goods.
Hand crafted nowadays translates to the interesting idea that one item is better because the person making it couldn’t maintain the concentration to keep the pattern consistent. Each is unique in that it has a lot of imperfections.
So nothing here is perfect but the richest of us can buy the one with the least imperfections to signal some kind of dominance. This kind of lunacy should not have persisted past the start of the industrial revolution but somehow it still keeps coming back.
I can, of course, buy one of the discounted ones from this section if I should feel the price is too high for the semi competent ones.
I now have the option of buying an even more misshapen blob vaguely in the shape of a bowl but at least no one will mistake it for something machine made.
Pottery tosspottery. I think I will take the philistine option.
