Thorstein Veblen
ARTS AND CRAFTS. 
The Journal of Political Economy, vol. 11, No. 1
(Dec., 1902), pp. 108-111 (in Notes)
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[108] The primary motive of the arts and crafts movement is, as the name 
implies, the association of art and labor. Initially an English movement, it has 
been slowly emerging from the general industrial field for about forty years.
... On its theoretical side the movement is, of course, much older than forty 
years, its development as an idea being measured by the lives of Carlyle, Ruskin 
and Morris.(1*)
The chapters which make up the greater part of Mr. Triggs's volume give an 
excellent outline of the work of Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris in relation to art 
and industry, followed by a sketch on Ashbee and the Reconstructed Workshop and 
another on Rookwood. The whole leads up to the practical efforts made in Chicago 
by the Industrial Art League, of which the author is secretary.
Little need be said here of the facile and engaging manner in which Mr. Triggs 
presents his plea for the work of regeneration in which the league is engaged, 
but it may not be out of place to speak of the economic bearing of such a 
movement as a departure in industrial aims and methods. The purpose is to 
humanize and beautify industry and to bring art into the everyday work of the 
industrial classes. This end is sought through a return to handicraft methods of 
work and an avoidance of competitive commercial methods of management. In the 
later phases of the propaganda machine production is not condemned without 
qualification, except in practice. Particularly is this true of Mr. Trigg's 
presentation of the case, although the earlier phases represented by Morris, and 
more especially by Ruskin, renounce the machine and all its works with an 
animation that is not to be mistaken. But even in the later phases of the 
movement the recognition of machine production as an unavoidable circumstance, 
if not indeed an unavoidable evil, is a perfunctory concession to facts rather 
than an integral element in the principles on which the advocates of the 
movement go about their work.
The movement, it must be said, runs on sentimental grounds rather than on 
grounds of reasoned practicability. Industrially it is not a continued growth 
out of the present, but seeks continuity with a past phase of economic life. 
This may be a necessity of the case. To find a basis for that "association of 
art and labor" at which the movement aims, such may perhaps be the only 
available recourse, and this is [109] scarcely the place to offer criticism on 
the artistic merits of such a course. But seen from the standpoint of industrial 
feasibility the whole matter looks somewhat different. Its striking trait in 
this respect is a certain "lack of contemporaneity." Modern industry, in so far 
as it is characteristically modern, means the machine process; but according to 
the arts-and-crafts apprehension, only outside the machine process is there 
salvation. Since the machine process is indispensable to modern culture, both on 
business grounds and for reasons of economy, this limits the immediate scope of 
the arts-and-crafts salvation to those higher levels of consumption where 
exigencies of business and economy are not decisive. The greater (90-99 per 
cent. of the whole) range of industry must under present circumstances of 
business and household management remain untouched by any such proposed 
alteration of the character of the industrial process. The "industrial art" 
methods are too costly for general business purposes, and the "industrial art" 
products are (in point of fact) too expensive for general consumption; indeed it 
is of the essence of industrial art products, if they are to pass inspection by 
the adepts, that they must be sufficiently expensive to preclude their use by 
the vulgar.
Culturally the movement is an offshoot of Romanticism, which means archaism, but 
always a sophisticated archaism. In the arts-and-crafts ritual the requisite 
sophistication is had by an insistence on genuiness, sincerity; which being 
interpreted in economic terms means a genuinely high labor cost. This 
requirement, of course, boldly traverses the requirements of modern business 
enterprise as well as of modern, that is to say democratic, culture. Business 
exigencies demand spurious goods, in the sense that the goods must cost less 
than they appear to; while a democratic culture requires low cost and a large, 
thoroughly standardized output of goods.
If the proposed association of art and labor is to go into effect under modern 
circumstances, it will have to mean the association of art with the machine 
process and with the technology of that process. Modern industry is machine 
industry, and the forms of labor for which there is an outlook under modern 
circumstances are those employments which are engaged in the machine industry. 
Such labor as is not associated with the machine process and conditioned by its 
technological requirements is in the position of an inconsequential interloper. 
Such work as goes on today without being immediately under the guidance of the 
mechanical technology, is, with sporadic exceptions, subsidiary to that main 
body of work which this technology directly [110] and unquestioningly controls. 
And the precarious margin of work still left outside the sweep of a rigorously 
consistent machine technology grows visibly narrower from day to day. Therefore, 
any movement for the reform of industrial art or for the inculcation of 
aesthetic ideals must fall into line with the technological exigencies of the 
machine process, unless it choose to hang as an anaemic fad upon the fringe of 
modern industry.
Men's, particularly workmen's, habits of thought in industrial matters are 
machine made, in a progressively more unmitigated degree; and if these habits of 
thought are to be shaped by any propaganda of ideals, they must be sought out 
and laid hold on in the field where they grow. The machine process has come, not 
so much to stay merely, but to go forward and root out of the workmen's scheme 
of thought whatever elements are alien to its own technological requirements and 
discipline. It ubiquitously and unremittingly disciplines the workman into its 
way of doing, and therefore into its way of apprehending and appreciating 
things. "Industrial art," therefore, which does not work through and in the 
spirit of the machine technology is, at the best, an exotic. It will not grow 
into a dandelion-like "weed of cultivation," for it has no chance of life beyond 
the hothouse shelter of decadent aestheticism.
But however impracticable, within the frontiers of a democratic culture, may be 
the (substantially aristocratic) ideals and proposals of the "Dreamer of 
dreams, born out of his due time," it does not follow from all this that the 
movement initiated by the Dreamer need be without salutary effect upon the 
working life of the workmen or the artistic value of their output of goods. 
Indirectly these ideals, romantic or otherwise, have already had a large effect, 
and there is every reason to hope that the propaganda of taste carried on by 
organizations like the Industrial Art League and its congeners will count for 
much in checking the current ugliness of the apparatus of life.
At its inception the movement was a romanticism, with a smear of lackadaisical 
aestheticism across its face. But that was not its whole meaning, nor is it the 
more enduring trait. Archaism and sophistication came of a revulsion against the 
besetting ugliness of what was present before the eyes of the leaders. The 
absolute dearth of beauty in the philistine present forced them to hark back to 
the past. The enduring characteristic is rather an insistence on sensuous beauty 
of line and color and on visible serviceability in all objects which it touches. 
And these results can be attained in fuller measure [111] through the 
technological expedients of which the machine process disposes than by any means 
within the reach of the industry of a past age.
Now, the particular line of arts and crafts endeavor for which Mr. Triggs 
speaks, the Industrial Art League, recognizes the force of this historical 
necessity more freely than the arts and crafts adepts of the stricter 
observance. Indeed, this aspiration after contemporaneity on the part of Mr. 
Triggs and his following is something of a stone of offense to the faithful, 
this apparently being the substantial reason why the Chicago Society of Arts and 
Crafts is not on speaking terms with the Industrial Art League. What has been 
said above, therefore, of the precarious outlook for industrial art under the 
régime of the machine process applies with less breadth to Mr. Triggs's line of 
endeavor than to many others.
V.
NOTES:
1) Chapters in the History of the Arts and Crafts Movement. By OSCAR LOVELL 
TRIGGS. Chicago, 1902. Published by the Bohemian Guild of the Industrial Art 
League.
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