Lost at the Arts & CRAFTS table
We are living in a post-industrial world—or at least that’s what my hair stylist, an amateur astrologist, tells me. People are going back to their hands, he says, because of a recent rare eclipse of Saturn and Jupiter. I nod obediently in the sink; but later I realize my agreement is more than absent-minded salon submission. Surely we all felt the tectonic rumble of a cultural tipping point over the past year: the shift from mass and fast to something more human. If it’s written in the stars, all the better.
Upon further inspection, the shift turns out not to be as abrupt as it seems. It’s been brewing for decades, as curator Glenn Adamson asserted in the 2007 book Th inking Th rough Craft and Rafael Cardoso further framed in his essay “Craft Versus Design: Moving Beyond a Tired Dichotomy” a year later. According to both, Do-It-Yourself revivalism grew up alongside the digital revolution, gaining strength in the ‘90s and 2000s and becoming a lingua franca among video game designers, Etsy business owners, HGTV fanatics, Burning Man float fabricators, obsessive shut-ins, and hobby survivalists. Fueled by equal parts nostalgia and financial ruin, this movement was in prime position to explode in the impending next Great Depression. And it did—when in the spring of 2020, COVID-19 christened a new generation of crafters, otherwise known as ordinary people trapped endlessly indoors.
However, by August, the ranks of the
