Glenn Adamson > Quotes

“Duane waxed lyrical about “the self-respect which every mechanic should feel, as forming part of that great basis upon which society is erected,” and condemned “idle and imbecile” speculators. As to the machinery wielded by the new capitalist class, he reminded his readers that it, too, was “a production of labor and of mechanical rules of art; and that even in its most perfect state, labor is necessary to its operation, as well to contrive and make, as to keep in order and put it in motion.” And he expressed a clear preference for small-scale manufactures, such as could be performed by just “one, two, or three artists, working with simple tools,” and preferably sold by the maker rather than entrusted to a “third person for sale.” America would be an artisan republic, an advanced economy without hierarchy: “a new thing on earth.”
― Glenn Adamson, Craft: An American History

“The philosophy of tea, he wrote, is not mere aestheticism in the ordinary acceptance of the term, for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe.2”
― Glenn Adamson, Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects

“Art must be of the people if it is to be art at all,” wrote Starr. “It is only when a man is doing work which he wishes done, and delights in doing, and which he is free to do as he likes, that his work becomes a language to him.”
― Glenn Adamson, Craft: An American History

“The worker in handicrafts will ask himself if there are not ways by which the sense of beauty could be extended from the somewhat narrow fields of art to the broader field of human relations. And he comes to see that to ask the question is in part to answer it.”
― Glenn Adamson, Craft: An American History

“complete submergence of the acquired skill in the subconscious.”
― Glenn Adamson, Craft: An American History

“For those of Hamiltonian inclination, liberty tended to be positively defined, freedom to—the right to pursue personal entrepreneurship, and expect government support. Jefferson, who had after all drafted the Declaration of Independence, tended to emphasize a negatively defined freedom from—the right not to be interfered with, not to be tyrannized. These differences of opinion have divided American politics right down to the present day.”
― Glenn Adamson, Craft: An American History