Handmade Consortium
I’m tempted to think that “consortium” sounds slightly shady. I don’t know why. I attended consortiums, or perhaps was in a consortium, when in grad school, I can’t remember which, and it seemed to involve quantities of kosher vegan food (I ate a lot of kosher vegan food in school) and occasionally cheap wine.
But this is not that consortium, and I digress. This is the Consortium that runs the Buy Handmade Pledge, and they emailed me a couple days ago to tell me that they were past the 10,000 mark - that is, more than 10,000 people have taken the pledge. I was, I believe, No. 639.
But also, there was an interesting article in the New York Times Magazine about the Pledge, which morphed into musings about Etsy (which has apparently topped 1,000,000 sales now), a few mentions of Craft and some confused contemplating of the whole craft movement and how it ought to be characterized. Hehe. I think it is fabulously interesting to see people who are not really connected with craft peek into this “movement” as it were and try to figure what’s going on.
I’ll also point you to the Flickr pool that the Consortium made of people creatively depicting their Handmade pledges. Some pretty interesting stuff in there, like this:
from Meu Pintinho Coloridinho aka Carola Rodrigues
3 Comments
feel free to leave a few words of your own...Anna — Thu Dec 20, 2007 at 10:43 am (link)It’s true that the need to define the movement in the article runs to the funny, but the article has interesting points to make about a DIY movement in a capitalist culture. For example, “The real lesson of the Black Apple may be not how many Emily Martin stories there have been (not many) but how many people figure that they, too, can achieve what she has (lots),” shows how American the phenomenon is. Most Americans don’t think we should tax the rich more because they believe that someday they will be that rich. There’s this belief “the money will follow.” But the reality is far more complicated.
Miriam — Thu Dec 20, 2007 at 11:54 am (link)I think the craft “movement” thing is a little funny - it’s only a movement not from intention but because (as the author of the article says) the “D.I.Y./craft scene [is] something that was already social, community-minded, supportive and aggressively using the Web.” True ‘dat. As far as Etsy goes, I think it’s a precarious balance. They’re an aggressively consumerist storefront based on DIY, which is essentially not consumer-based. Thinking about it makes me scratch my head a bit. It’s capitalist, but not. I think it works because of a certain model of consumerism that’s really not very capitalist that creates value for non-monetary consumer ideas such as “indie” or “handmade” or “artistic.” When price is not the only consideration, people consume differently. It’s just one more model of economics dependent on individual value prioritization. It’s almost a way to be a consumer, but not, at the same time.
