Crafts Report: Public Opinion

WHAT'S YOUR OPINION?

Each month, The Crafts Report invites readers to respond to the Public Opinion question. Responses are published in the magazine.

This month’s question is: Gallery owners: How do you feel about your artists selling retail through their Web sites?

Please respond by April. 8, 2002. Responses to this question will appear in the June 2002 issue.

E-mail:
publicopinion@craftsreport.com; or CLICK HERE

Send responses to: “Public Opinion,” The Crafts Report, 300 Water St., Wilmington, DE 19801; fax: (302) 656-4894.

Anonymous responses will no longer be published.

No. Most of these items become manufactured items. Few, if any, can maintain a hands-on style.

A mass-produced item should not even be allowed to be called a craft. Also, it is very hard to produce a good quality product and still be able to compete price-wise with department stores.

No, and we have seen proof of this in the decorative painting world. We have seen many decorative painting designers cross over and license their designs for mass production. The result is sloppy, devalued work. Mass-produced “hand-painted” items cannot retain the quality of truly hand-painted products. Why? Care and attention to detail is lost on the assembly line.

I do not think it is possible. Department stores are about volume, price and the masses: masses of people and mass quantities of items.

Your business will cease to be a craft business and [you will become a] factory or production business. I don’t see it as a positive and productive venue for crafters and artists.

What a question! How can there be a shred of “handmade value” left in a product that is capable of being “mass-marketed” through “larger chain and/or department stores.” The very concept of handmade is in opposition to such a sales scheme. The minimum production quantities necessary to supply such a market are inherently contrary to the definition of handmade. The only exception I can imagine would be for items produced in a third world economic setting and then imported to the United States. If anyone can offer an alternative to this I would thoroughly enjoy discussing it.

No. When a shopper moves through a chain or department store, the pace does not allow them time to appreciate craft. With space at a premium, the display will not draw the shopper toward the pieces. Personnel don’t have the time to select and place each piece for the optimum attractiveness. And, when crafts are offered with mass-produced items, the price points are not in line with what appear to be similar products. Offered in a setting where the pace, place, personnel and price points work against the craft, crafts will lose every time.

Think of how many kitchen-table enterprises that outgrew that humble, handmade-by-one-person scope, to blossom into a full-blown factory of sorts, or bigger. Is the hands-on, attention to detail still there? Does each piece have some idiosyncrasy that marks it as handmade, like an endearingly slightly crooked ear on a teddy bear?

To buy a “hand-woven” garment at a chain/department store, I would suspect that there are a thousand or more carbon copies of the thing, no matter what the hangtag might say. Were I to purchase a hand-woven garment at an art show, I’d meet the person who wove it and would have a feeling of personal connection to the artist, plus the joy of possessing the “work of her hands,” a truly one-of-a-kind garment. I also know that the money I have paid is going to the artist rather than to the impersonal link on the marketing chain. Even if the artist’s price was higher than the store’s, I’d rather shop with the artist.