In the first minute of the TLC summer show “Craft Wars,” the host Tori Spelling says the word “craft” and its variants over a dozen times. It’s the “ultimate crafting competition.” Competitors have “every crafting tool they could dream of.” “As an avid crafter myself, with my own crafting line….” The repetition seems unnecessary, given the show’s title and the beauty wall behind Spelling featuring the full spectrum of fabric, thread, tools, and notions. But after listening to Spelling say “craft” a few dozen more times, without substitution, I realized her writers weren’t brand-crazy. They were just stumped. There are no synonyms for a word that has lost its meaning.
What “craft” mostly means on “Craft Wars” is the act of making things cuter. Take this shopping cart full of sports equipment and make a cute bag. Take this shopping cart full of school supplies and make a cute playhouse. That these bags will never be used, that some of them are not even completed, that, really, a duffel bag has already achieved ideal sports-bag form, are not considerations, not when a sawed-off tennis racket can be inserted “for ventilation” and tennis balls strung to make a “more comfortable” carrying strap. And what could be more delightful than a playhouse roofed in composition-book covers, never mind its ability to withstand rain?
Craft used to mean something, and it would never have been made with Mod Podge. You can buy a tea towel with the William Morris quotation, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” (It is a hundred per cent linen, so it is both.) What Morris, a designer, entrepreneur, futurist, and leader of the late nineteenth century Arts and Crafts Movement, proposed was a return to the medieval craft tradition, in which objects were made by hand by skilled workmen, and priced accordingly. Rather than three sets of elaborately decorated transferware china, you would have one set of handmade and glazed plates. Rather than rooms full of elaborate Victorian furniture, you would own a few chairs, hand hewn and joined with wood, not industrial glue.
Reformers like Morris proposed that we live with less, but better, much as the unconsumption movement does today. Recent books like “Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Clothing” show the physical and environmental toll of a closet stuffed with ten-dollar why-not dresses, while blogs like “Make It Do,” “Unconsumption,” and “Stuff Does Matter” suggest new criteria for getting, spending, and discarding the contents of those closets and cupboards. And many of those criteria derive from the old-school definition of craft: make it yourself, buy better quality items, think about each purchase, keep it for a long time.
“Craft Wars,” in contrast, seesaws uneasily between the desire to make it beautiful and the desire to make it useful and usually ends up at neither. Two competitors, asked to craft a birdhouse out of the contents of a kitchen junk drawer, build chunky boxes out of wood, and start sticking the junk to them. (The Victorians would have used seashells, to better effect.) Asked to make patio furniture out of beach toys, the competitors give us wetsuit throw pillows and a plastic pail turned ice bucket versus a lounge chair made of boogie boards threaded together on a steel-pipe frame. The boogie-board lounge maker, the only male contestant in the first two episodes, is also the only crafter whose skill Morris would have recognized. Kevin Chartier, who was laid off an an art director, makes metal sculpture while working as a stay-at-home father and handyman. When confronted with a large scale, three-dimensional project, he didn’t separate the beautiful from the useful, but got out the blowtorch. It’s regrettable, given the overall demographics of the show’s audience, that it had to be a man with power tools that broke the show’s decorated box. The longstanding gender division between the craftsman working for money, and the craftswoman working to feed, clothe, and comfort her family seemed re-inscribed.
by Alexandra Lange, New Yorker | Read more:
What “craft” mostly means on “Craft Wars” is the act of making things cuter. Take this shopping cart full of sports equipment and make a cute bag. Take this shopping cart full of school supplies and make a cute playhouse. That these bags will never be used, that some of them are not even completed, that, really, a duffel bag has already achieved ideal sports-bag form, are not considerations, not when a sawed-off tennis racket can be inserted “for ventilation” and tennis balls strung to make a “more comfortable” carrying strap. And what could be more delightful than a playhouse roofed in composition-book covers, never mind its ability to withstand rain?Craft used to mean something, and it would never have been made with Mod Podge. You can buy a tea towel with the William Morris quotation, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” (It is a hundred per cent linen, so it is both.) What Morris, a designer, entrepreneur, futurist, and leader of the late nineteenth century Arts and Crafts Movement, proposed was a return to the medieval craft tradition, in which objects were made by hand by skilled workmen, and priced accordingly. Rather than three sets of elaborately decorated transferware china, you would have one set of handmade and glazed plates. Rather than rooms full of elaborate Victorian furniture, you would own a few chairs, hand hewn and joined with wood, not industrial glue.
Reformers like Morris proposed that we live with less, but better, much as the unconsumption movement does today. Recent books like “Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Clothing” show the physical and environmental toll of a closet stuffed with ten-dollar why-not dresses, while blogs like “Make It Do,” “Unconsumption,” and “Stuff Does Matter” suggest new criteria for getting, spending, and discarding the contents of those closets and cupboards. And many of those criteria derive from the old-school definition of craft: make it yourself, buy better quality items, think about each purchase, keep it for a long time.
“Craft Wars,” in contrast, seesaws uneasily between the desire to make it beautiful and the desire to make it useful and usually ends up at neither. Two competitors, asked to craft a birdhouse out of the contents of a kitchen junk drawer, build chunky boxes out of wood, and start sticking the junk to them. (The Victorians would have used seashells, to better effect.) Asked to make patio furniture out of beach toys, the competitors give us wetsuit throw pillows and a plastic pail turned ice bucket versus a lounge chair made of boogie boards threaded together on a steel-pipe frame. The boogie-board lounge maker, the only male contestant in the first two episodes, is also the only crafter whose skill Morris would have recognized. Kevin Chartier, who was laid off an an art director, makes metal sculpture while working as a stay-at-home father and handyman. When confronted with a large scale, three-dimensional project, he didn’t separate the beautiful from the useful, but got out the blowtorch. It’s regrettable, given the overall demographics of the show’s audience, that it had to be a man with power tools that broke the show’s decorated box. The longstanding gender division between the craftsman working for money, and the craftswoman working to feed, clothe, and comfort her family seemed re-inscribed.
by Alexandra Lange, New Yorker | Read more:
Illustration by Kim Demarco.
