Kevin Murray’s recent AJF posting (“Nothing if Not Critical,” June 5, 2011) strikes me as earnest but naive. His essay concludes, “And eventually aestheticism may flower again, just as the garden regains it bloom after a radical pruning. The ambivalence of contemporary jewelry towards ethics is not a bad thing. Aesthetics prevents mindless moralism: it keeps us honest. But without ethics, we are left talking to ourselves.”

Huh? Aesthetics are irrelevant, obsolete? (They may be, but not for the reasons Murray cites.) We are obliged to be, first and foremost, ethical? This is quasi-Marxist bunkum. Good ethics are nice, and it’s hard to defend practices like the use of blood diamonds, but as soon as you start requiring certain behaviors, you enter the ugly territory of intellectual fascism. If we wish to overlook fine upstanding ethical standards and only talk to ourselves, that’s our right.

If you lived through the 6os, you remember the moral certainty of the era. The civil rights and antiwar movements spawned dozens of groups whose absolute moral visions brooked no alternatives. The Maoists, the Trotskyites, the mainstream Communists all laid claim to the true path to social justice and world peace, while at the same time reviling competing claims. I’m sure they all regarded themselves as highly ethical and totally sincere in their desire to fix the world. However, morality very quickly devolves into intolerance. This is the ugly side of ethics: my morality is better than yours. If Kevin Murray thinks his ethical vision is immune from intolerance, he’s naive.

Anyone who proposes that art (or craft, or jewelry) must embrace social activism needs to think about effectiveness. If the goal is social change, then the measure of artistic success must be change itself. Pleasure, if allowed in to the equation at all, is a means, a delivery system that makes the social activism more effective. There’s simply no way around the criterion of effectiveness. You want activism? You must take effectiveness as your primary standard of artistic achievement.

It doesn’t take too much imagination to figure out that there’s a conflict here. The history of modern art is the history of artistic freedom, of the artist’s hard-earned right to do precisely what he deems necessary. While we might take artistic autonomy for granted today, it was not always so. Time was artists were effectively servants of church, state and their wealthy private patrons. In the 18th century, the academies exerted a new control over subject matter, with the most moral subjects given highest priority. It took French rebels like Baudelaire to insist on art that responded first and foremost to the internal demands of the artists, and the rest of the world be damned. If the artist has any moral obligation, it’s to his own freedom. This concept has had a number of manifestations in the past two centuries, from Whister’s Nocturnes to conceptual art.

One would assume that activism is freely chosen, and thus would not undermine artistic autonomy. But the need for effectiveness is something else. The artistic choice is no longer the exclusive property of the artist, but is dictated by whether or not the artwork will bring about the desired change. It’s art driven by results, judged much the same way we judge a good advertising campaign. So, I ask you: do you think judging a work of art the same way we size up a Coke commercial is a good thing?

Now, there’s another way to think about activism. We could conclude that the good ethics of the artwork is sufficient, the moral authority of the art can carry the day, and effectiveness is not necessary. Art then becomes a symbolic gesture. I picked up this concept from Arthur Danto. He proposed that we can act in a way that assumes the world is exactly as we would want it to be. For instance, we could take an activist position against racial bias by refusing to ever act in a prejudiced manner. The refusal is a private matter, and may never be noticed in the larger world. But it is still essentially ethical, and stands as a critique of the corruption of the wider world.

In the symbolic gesture, then, effectiveness is a non-factor. It doesn’t matter if the gesture has the least effect in the world. All that matters is that the gesture was made.

If one has any pretensions towards ethical art, one must come to a position about effectiveness and the symbolic gesture. Me, I’m a big fan of the symbolic gesture. It allows the artist to take an ethical position, but not worry about whether the artwork is effective propaganda.

Art, of course, has a terrible record as an agent of social change. All that well-meaning art, from Russian Constructivism to the late Bauhaus, from social realism to anti-war posters in the 1970s, had no discernable effect on society. Mostly, these artforms preached to the converted, functioning more like cheerleaders that powerful stimulants of reform.

Jewelry’s record is no better. Generally, activist jewelry takes the form of badges. The purple and green badges in support of women’s suffrage; political campaign badges; peace signs; black power emblems. Every era, it seems, has an iconic political symbol that can be reduced to a badge. Occasionally, they become quite popular. But do they change people’s minds? I don’t know, but would you vote for Sarah Palin because you saw somebody wearing a Palin badge?

I can think of one example of craft that did have a political effect: the AIDS quilt. This started as a grass-roots project in the 1980s to commemorate the lives of lovers and relations who had died of AIDS. In time, tens of thousands of people contributed their own squares in memory of their loved ones. In the context of the times, when AIDS was widely regarded as god’s punishment for sin and the only good fag was a dead one, just making a square for the AIDS quilt was a pretty radical gesture. When the organizers installed the AIDS quilt on the national mall – covering the entire lawn – the aerial photograph was stunning. The sheer size of the quilt was a visual metaphor for all the people who died, and the fact that every one of them had family and friends who saw fit to memorialize them showed how widely the loss and sorrow of AIDS had permeated the culture. It was undeniable, and incredibly powerful. I have a feeling that the AIDS quilt changed a few hearts and minds.
Studio jewelry doesn’t stand much of a chance as an effective agent of change. Political change is caused by repetition of the message: it must be made again and again, just like advertising. There are some recent examples of design that have had profound social effects, and they have worked only because they could be repeated millions of times. The best case of design causing salutary social change that I know of is the CFL lightbulb. It had been in existence for years before an environmental activist convinced a Wal-Mart executive that they should promote the CFL bulb because it was a social good. Once Wal-Mart came on board, they decided to sell CFL bulbs cheap, and promote them heavily. The reduced carbon footprint in the U.S. directly attributed to the replacement of incandescent bulbs runs into the millions of tons of CO2 emissions annually. Now, that’s success. And it was only brought about because CFL bulbs can be manufactured in vast quantities, and because the nation’s largest retailer decided to promote the cause.

There’s nothing analogous in jewelry to the CFL bulb. Jewelry isn’t necessary the way light bulbs are. Because there will never be single design that applies to all jewelry, it’s not going to be manufactured in the millions. Jewelry is too private and too highly individualized to penetrate into every corner of the culture. In other words, forget the fantasy that studio jewelry will ever be an effective tool for social change. Forget it.

Making PC jewelry might be a nice way to preach to the choir, and a gratifying way to admire one’s own ethics. But it’s sheer fantasy to think that studio jewelry can be an effective tool for political reform.

Murray cites Ethical Metalsmiths as a fine example of craft-based advocacy. But the thing is: the most important agenda of Ethical Metalsmiths is to design and implement clear standards for the production of “green,” environmentally safe and socially benign gold. The means to this end is not the production of nice little objects, but putting pressure on major producers and users of gold. It’s traditional activism, not craft, that will bring their agenda to fruition.

Murray insists that global warming is the evil of the century, and implies that every citizen has a moral responsibility to deal with it. But to suggest that jewelry will be an effective tool to combat global warming is sheer lunacy. Global warming is about burning billions of tons of fossil fuels, and about patterns of excessive consumer consumption. Jewelry is just too small an enterprise to have any role beyond being a symbolic gesture.

If one wishes to be an advocate and push an ethical position forward, it’s extremely important to keep a few insights in mind. First of all, remember that your ethics may not be universally shared. When Gabriel Craig said in his lecture at the Houston/SNAG conference that there was a moral imperative to recycling and green practices, I was quite annoyed. Basically, this guy was telling me what to do. While I respect the green agenda, I do not support all aspects of it, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to sign on to every dumb idea that purports to promote sustainability. So, tolerance must always come first.

One must also think about effectiveness. What if it becomes obvious that turning to political advocacy would be more efficient in bring the desired goal to reality – would the advocate quit making things? Would one become, in effect, a politician?

Speaking strictly for myself, I decided against this option many years ago. I’m a lousy politician, and I despise many of the activities necessary for effective advocacy. My gift is imagining and making things. Only as a maker can I truly excel, and only as a maker can I make a contribution that might matter. If I have a responsibility, it is to exercise my gift. It is to function as an autonomous artist who serves only my own vision. In the long run, this is my only hope to have a real effect on the world. And it won’t be about ethics, not at all.

Foreword: I wrote this essay in response to Ruudt Peters “Anima” series as displayed at the 2010 New York SOFA. At the time, it just seemed too controversial to publish. Now, a year and a half later, it won’t have as much power. But it still remains relevant in the big picture. And, in a curious footnote, Peters thought so much of his “Anima” series that he published a book on them.

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Jewelers who attended SOFA/NY last year may have been aware of a brewing controversy: Ruudt Peters’ new “Anima” series bears an unmistakable resemblance to some of Stanley Lechtzin’s poured-wax-in-water/electroformed jewelry from about 1970 to 1980. I first saw the new Peters work in the “Schmuck 2010” catalogue, and I was shocked. I didn’t understand how an experienced professional like Peters could have produced a body of work that was so blatantly unoriginal.

A week or so later, I heard a report that Lechtzin was deeply upset. I was told he used the word “plagiarism” to characterize the situation. In such circumstances, lawyers sometimes get involved, and I did not wish to see any of the interested parties – Lechtzin, Stefan Friedemann (co- owner of Ornamentum Gallery, which showed Peters’ work at SOFA) or Peters – get caught up in litigation. So I emailed Friedemann to apprise him of the controversy. Over the next two weeks, I read some of the feedback that Friedemann was getting, and looked into some of the assertions that were being made in support of Peters’ jewelry.

Friedemann contacted Lechtzin, but I was not privy to their discussion. Ultimately, Lechtzin sent me an email just before SOFA opened, saying, “Let history be the judge.” Since I know Lechtzin’s work in modest detail – I was one of his grad students at Tyler from 1975 to 1977, and I saw his retrospective here in Philadelphia last year – and since I saw the “Anima” show first hand, I figure I’ll make a contribution to history’s judgment.

To start, Peters says he was not aware of Lechtzin’s poured-wax electroforms. I find his claim credible. Lechtzin was known in Europe for his large torques in the 1970s, not for the poured-wax work. There were two books that reproduced a few examples of Lechtzin’s poured-wax jewelry that Peters might have seen, but in both cases the pictures were small and well in the back of the books. (The two books were Barbara Cartlidge’s 1985 Twentieth Century Jewelry and the more recent Cindy Strauss book on the Helen Williams Drutt Collection published by the Houston MFA.) Peters could easily have overlooked the images. In the end, I think it highly unlikely that Peters plagiarized Lechtzin’s work. As far as I can tell, it was a case of accidentally re-inventing the wheel.

At SOFA, Peters gave a charming, disarming lecture about his jewelry, including the “Anima” series. He credited Lechtzin’s work, and offered a history of pouring wax into water as a form of divination. (Peters didn’t mention it, but pouring wax into water is also a Surrealist technique, called coulage.) Nobody in the audience questioned Peters about the resemblance to Lechtzin’s jewelry. Everything seemed fine. All the worrying was just momentary hysteria, right?

I’m not so inclined to look the other way and pretend everything’s copasetic. There are several problems with the “Anima” series, and the jewelry community might want to think them through.

The most obvious problem is that the “Anima” series is not original, at least as far as form is concerned. While I doubt Peters plagiarized, and he probably arrived at the poured-wax-in-water technique independently, it’s also true that Stanley Lechtzin is the originator. Lechtzin brought those forms to jewelry 40 years ago. And Peters’ forms are ridiculously close to Lechtzin’s.

Originality is one of the bedrock criteria Westerners employ when they evaluate artworks. Art is regarded as an ongoing discourse, and each original artwork adds something to the story. While most observers discarded the idea that there is only one narrative thread (from Impressionism through Cubism to non-objective art, for instance), we still look for a discernable difference. We don’t ask of art: What’s the same? We always ask: What’s new? What did this artist contribute?

To be fair, not all art traditions value originality. In traditional Chinese painting, it was commonplace for an ambitious artist to work in the style of a master. The test of success was how convincing the homage was: if the copy was indistinguishable from the source, it was a good thing. In Western painting, young artists used to set up their easels in museums and assiduously copy great paintings as a learning exercise. And there are traditions in which historical prototypes set a performative standard, which contemporary artists can interpret (or copy) freely. In theater, dance and music, this is called repertory. Observers take great pleasure in noting the fidelity of the reproduction – this is the entire logic for performing classical music on period instruments, for instance. It’s also the logic for rock n’ roll tribute bands.

Then there was the heyday of appropriation in the early 1980s, when Sherrie Levine re-photographed famous photographs and claimed her work as original art. In context the tactic made some sense, given that various philosophers were nattering on about the absolute impossibility of new thoughts given the impenetrable “prison-house of language,” etc. etc. Those ideas are now more than 40 years old, and no longer have the capacity to provoke. If anything, pure appropriation is now snooze-inducing. The art world has moved on, and originality has reclaimed some of its glamour.

So what are we to think of a notable jewelry artist producing forms that have already been created by another jeweler? You will never convince me that Ruudt Peters is concerned with appropriation or repertory. Nor, given his record, is there any likelihood that he’s questioning the legitimacy of originality as a criterion of value. My conclusion is that Peters thought he was being original. He wasn’t. Basically, he blew it.

Stefan Friedemann suggested that Peters followed an entirely different thought process to get to his poured-wax forms, and therefore the “Anima” series must be regarded as an original body of work. According to this logic, a difference in thinking trumps sameness of form. Concept is more important than appearance. To me, this smacks of bad art-school philosophy. Are we really prepared to declare that concept counts for everything, and it doesn’t matter what an artwork looks like? It’s all a matter of the spiel?

For the sake of argument, let’s accept Freidemann’s assertion. OK, then, what was Peters’ thought process? In his lecture, Peters told us about his “Lingam” project: a compendium of phalluses he solicited from a large number of artists. Peters then recounted how he wanted to re-connect with his feminine side after all that maleness. To that end, he drew blindfolded for a while. He responded favorably to his blindfold drawings, finding the lack of control appealing. So he embarked on a search for a process to generate wearable forms in a way that similarly removed the artist from control. More or less by accident, he stumbled on pouring melted wax into water. Viola! While he might set up conditions for a certain kind of form – the temperature of the wax, the kind of wax, the amount of wax he poured into the water – the actual form is strictly accidental and beyond the reach of human control. Like Duchamp’s “Three Standard Stoppages,” the visual form is aleatory, more-or-less random. It was this process of semi-controlled accident that led to the “Anima” series.

The term “anima” is from Carl Jung. He defines it as “the female element in every male.” (“Approaching the Unconscious” in Man and His Symbols, New York, Doubleday, 1964: 31). According to Jung, dreams allow access to the unconscious, which in turn allows access to archetypes: the great human collective of symbols and wisdom. Among this wisdom is the presence of the anima in males and the animus in females. For a man to accept his anima is to embrace psychological wholeness. But it’s not simple. In Jungian psychology there is a progression within the anima that goes through four stages from self-delusion to self-awareness.

In his talk, Peters did not explore the implications of Jung’s anima. Instead, he simply equated the feminine with a loss of conscious control. This is an old sexist connection between femininity and nature – that is, brutish animality. The woman is presumed to be a receptacle of animal instinct, particularly sexual appetite, eager to lead the man of higher intellect into the slough of desire. Needless to say, feminists found this connection offensive. To equate the female with nature/unconscious is to privilege men and demean women. Haven’t we had enough of that nonsense?

The feminist protest against equating femininity with the unconscious didn’t stop Peters. Not for one second. Never mind that Jung’s view of the anima is far more nuanced. Never mind that Jung viewed the unconscious as a route to wisdom, not a vehicle for random uncontrol. And although Jung insists there can be a negative aspect of the anima, he never equates the female principle with the unconscious or the primitive.

Recent research in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology strongly suggests that there are essential differences between male and female, but these differences are sited in brain structure, child-rearing strategies, social bonding and other phenomena at the intersection of culture and biology. Instead of grounding his thinking in science, Peters blithely resurrected a demeaning old stereotype.

Oddly, in aspiring to a lack of control, Peters may have echoed Lechtzin’s own thinking. I recall a graduate seminar in 1976 in which Lechtzin railed against the idea that an artistic act could be unpremeditated. Lechtzin argued that intention and control remains as long as the artist is an active agent in the process. It seemed a strange argument at the time, but I now realize Lechtzin was criticizing the rhetoric surrounding Abstract-Expressionist painting. In the 40s and 50s, many painters claimed that they could paint in an unpremeditated manner, and thus generate unexpected (and presumably inspired) forms. (For a summary of the painterly attitudes towards spontaneous action, see Irving Sandler’s The Triumph of American Painting, 92-100.) Lechtzin’s critique of unpremeditated action, it turns out, explains his interest in pouring wax into water. Here was a way to develop form without direct human intervention. In effect, Lechtzin’s electroforms of the early 70s were a repudiation of a cherished myth of “heroic” American painting. Lechtzin was just as interested in uncontrol as Peters – but for a much more sophisticated reason.

Peters made another suspect assertion when he discussed his installation. All his brooches were mounted on circular mirrors, which were suspended from overhead tracks. The mirrors moved and jiggled slightly, so in turn their reflections shimmered on the floors and walls of the Ornamentum booth. To walk through the display was to get slightly disoriented in a thicket of objects and their reflections, in light and shadow. It was a delightful experience.

But Peters’ explanation? He said that he came upon the idea of using the mirrors when he remembered that the mirror is an attribute of Venus. That’s nice and all, and classical mythology can sometimes say useful things about human nature. But equating mirrors with the feminine? What a dumb idea. It’s another sexist rap against women: that they are inevitably vain, absorbed in self-regard. But anybody who has walked past a workout gym will see that mirrors and overweening vanity are every bit as masculine as feminine. I loved the installation, but I wish Peters had never mentioned his thought process.

I launched this examination of the ideas that support Ruudt Peters’ “Anima” series because it was claimed that his thinking justified the lack of visual originality. A close look at his thinking shows Peters to be naïve at best, and demeaning to women at worst. I’m pretty sure Peters didn’t intend to insult women, but artists must take responsibility for the ideas they put out in the world. And if we are to believe that good jewelry has a conceptual underpinning, then we are obliged to examine the logic that supports the work. If the logic fails, then to some degree the work fails too.

Some might disagree. After all, any number of artists have made great work based on bad thinking. In the May 2010 issue of Art in America, Pepe Karmel notes that most of Yves Klein’s thinking was “complete bunkum,” but goes on the observe that “many of the masters of modern art based their work on silly theories, and there’s often something to be learned from an artist’s relation to those theories.” (“Yves Klein: Art and Alchemy,” p. 117) But I believe that one legacy of conceptual art is that we must demand careful thinking. If art flirts with philosophy – which it does – then observers have every right to demand that the thought process be sound.

In the end, the “Anima” series is not a good body of work. It is compromised by a lack of originality in visual terms, and by fuzzy sexist thinking. This was not Ruudt Peters’ shining moment. He’ll move on, I’m sure. In the meantime, the whole “Anima” series should be quietly relegated to a shoebox. But that won’t happen, will it?

If some good emerges from the situation, maybe people will reevaluate Stanley Lechtzin’s electroforms from the 1970s and early 80s. I think some of his jewelry from that period was brilliant. The poured-wax electroforms were intelligent, subtle, beautiful – and great jewelry.

No doubt, some people will think I’m splitting hairs here. (Or they’ll think I’ve got it in for Ruudt Peters. I don’t. I like the guy, and I bought one of his “Azoth” series of brooches.) In art, the consequences of bad ideas are not as urgent as, say, setting off a cherry bomb inside a moving car. But I don’t think all ideas are equally sensible. The thought process that informs art (or jewelry) must be open to critique. And nobody should get a free pass. Nobody.

Early in January 2011, Kim Voigt and I saw the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s Fourth Design Triennial, called “Why Design Now?” I have seen the Triennials in 2000 and 2006 as well, and the 2010 version represented a notable shift in emphasis. This iteration focused on designs that “address social and ecological problems.” The agenda was heavily skewed towards green, sustainable, and low environmental impact designs. Like several other recent design exhibitions, there were both realized designs and blue-sky proposals. The viewer had to pore over the text panels to figure out which was which.

Mixing imaginative proposals with designs that are in production irks me. Blue-sky proposals have not undergone a process of development, nor have they been tested in the marketplace. They remind me of nothing so much as the idiotic schemes that Mechanix Illustrated used to publish in the 1930s. I have an issue that features, among other things, a “combination city building and airport of the future,” complete with rotating runway on top. That one didn’t exactly work out, did it? Untested proposals have exactly the same problem: they may be total flops. To me, placing blue-sky designs next to those that have been fully realized insults all the hard work of development that goes into the work that has been brought all the way to the production phase.

That said, some of the designs were ingenious. There was a building material made of mushroom roots, an incubator made (partly) of scrap car pars, and a digitally-controlled machine that squirts out concrete walls. All very cool, if perhaps impractical.

The exhibit was, in many ways, a green-fest. Lots of biodegradable materials and low-carbon footprint buildings. Lots of DIY machines for third-world applications like threshing millet or carrying jugs of water. Lots of socially responsible and interactive systems, including Etsy.com. And, rather inexplicably, the iPhone. Really, I don’t think clever gadgets that consumers want to upgrade every two years are remotely green. But there it was.

Craft made an appearance, usually representing “slow” design and third-world employment. Interesting how craft has come to represent virtuous design – which craftstpeople have known for decades, but could never convincingly articulate. Finally, the design avant-garde is waking up, you know? There were marvelous lighting fixtures and seating by David Trubridge, hand-stitched garments by Alabama Chanin, and Heath Ceramics. Nice that craft is no longer invisible in such lofty precincts as the Cooper-Hewitt. One has to wonder, though: what will happen when green is no longer trendy?

After we went through the show, Kim and I considered what we had just seen. She noted that the exhibit was uninspiring. Actually, kind of dull.

So much of the design language in “Why Design Now” was warmed-over mid-century modernism. Functional objects stripped of all decoration. Buildings with metal frames and floor-to-ceiling windows. Socially responsible materials. (Intended to respond not to industrial plenitude, but a sense of impending scarcity.) But all this earnestness was clothed in boring forms. Why Dull Now?

The exhibit was a huge contrast to a book I bought in the gift shop, titled “Stuffz: Design on Material,” Basically a compendium of current surface design, the book was energetic and exciting. There was a strong flavor of “Juxtapoz” magazine, with notes of vinyl toys, Japanese Post-Pop, and street art. There was a little hi-style design too, like interiors by Jurgen Bey and Marcel Wanders. “Stuffz” was fascinating and fun. In comparison, “Why Design Now” was soooooo sincere but not very compelling.

I’m puzzled by the apparent linkage between green design and modernism. In a way, it’s like mediocre conceptual art: all backstory, no visual entertainment. Is it a Calvinist streak? Do green designers feel they must prove their sincerity by eschewing visual and emotional complexity? It sure looks like it.

Or, it could be that mid-century modern has lost its original associations with industrial mass-production, and has semiotically mutated into the visual language of sincerity, efficiency and social good. That’s possible. I mean, we certainly wouldn’t look to Art Deco or Memphis or blobitecture to advertise our intention to improve the world. And since green designers presumably want to look like they’re keeping costs down, the unornamented style of modernism might seem appropriate.

And then there’s the ghost of Marxist critique. Visual entertainment – ornament, pattern, color, complexity, semiotic play – is still understood in some circles as serving capitalism by stimulating consumption. In this view, the more a design relies on the non-functional aspects of style, the more it serves planned obsolescence, in which consumers are enticed to buy new stuff and throw away the old. Myself, I see no reason to think that green design must take any particular visual style. If anything, the dullness of “Why Design Now?” proves that we haven’t invented a visual language that truly represents the present, and is not just a passing fashion. We have yet to supplant modernism.

At a deeper level, I happen to think that all this heavy breathing about green design is misleading. The defining assumption is that we can cut back on greenhouse gas emission and the waste of natural resources with better design. That may be true, but only partly so. We probably won’t halt global warming by buying wooden radios, or planting grass on the roofs of buildings.

The truth of the matter is that effective green change must take place in the realm of industrial production and mass-consumption. Change must occur in increments that can be repeated millions of times by millions of people. And that means our basic habits of consumption must change. Ultimately, we must buy less, but more expensive, stuff. Craft is only a miniscule part of the answer.

My nominee for most effective green design is the marketing of the CFL, the compact florescent lamp. Notice that I did not credit the bulb itself. CFLs languished on store shelves for a number of years, caught in a situation where production costs remained high because sales remained low. It took Steve Hamburg, an environmental studies professor at Brown University, and Fred Krupp, president of the advocacy group Environmental Defense, to break the cycle. Sensing the Wal-Mart could use some positive public relations – this was when the company was being accused of exploiting their employees mercilessly – Hamburg and Krupp set about convincing executives that they could effect a considerable social good by pushing CFL bulbs. Wal-Mart agreed. They started selling CFL bulbs at very close to cost, accompanied by an advertising campaign. They pressured their suppliers. Lo and behold! Sales rose exponentially, costs went down, other manufacturers jumped into the fray. Americans have now replaced enough incandescent bulbs to reduce energy consumption by supertankers full of oil. Not bad for the work of two visionary guys.

The CFL bulb, by itself, did not effect this change. Two far-sighted activists did. Corporate America (in a rare moment of enlightenment) did. Millions of consumers did.

“Why Design Now?” was ultimately confused. The exhibit did not offer a sustained examination of patterns of consumption. Most of the designs on display, cool as they might be, evade the essential problem. The design of objects is only the starting-point for effective environmental change. The real action is in the marketplace.

But then, marketing plans and social activism are processes that aren’t inherently visual. To have an exhibit at all, the Cooper-Hewitt needs objects, or at the very least, documents. Next time, how about an all-document show for the Triennial? Nothing but text panels and charts and videos. I don’t know what you think, but it sounds dull to me.

Maybe a dirty little secret of design is that it’s primarily visual. Being visual, interesting design depends on invention and difference. As with art, it’s not satisfying to repeat the past. We want to see something original; we don’t want to see another Superleggera Chair passed off as new. And here, my emphasis is on “see.” Not just to know, but to see.

Last year, I participated in the Museum of Arts and Design’s annual jewelry sale/fundraiser, LOOT. They’ve being organizing LOOT for years, and I haven’t sent work for quite a while. I got a personal invitation from Donna Schneier – who has been very good to me – and I accepted.

In the past, the galleries who represented my work did not want me to participate. First Helen Drutt and then Charon Kransen discouraged their jewelers from taking part. Typically, their argument was about competition: LOOT took sales away from galleries. Their idea was that a piece of jewelry sold in one venue causes another piece of jewelry to go unsold elsewhere. This is classic zero-sum thinking: only so much work can be sold, and no more. However, my sense was that LOOT had the potential to bring new collectors into the field, thus expanding the marketplace. And if not that, LOOT could at least encourage collectors to be more enthusiastic about studio jewelry, and buy more work from all sources.

As far as I know, neither argument is supported by facts. I never heard of a collector saying to a gallery owner, “I bought all the jewelry I want at LOOT, so tough on you!” On the other hand, I never heard anybody claim that they were motivated to collect studio jewelry because they were inspired by LOOT. Lacking data, it’s impossible to determine which side is right.

So, when Schneier invited me last year, I thought it would be a harmless way to support MAD. Not that I’m a big fan of MAD, but I’m impressed by their recent exhibitions. For reasons that elude me, the institution seems to have woken up and decided to mount interesting shows. So, wotthell? I sent a necklace and three brooches.

I also traveled up to New York to see LOOT, since I hadn’t seen the thing in years. It was an education. I’ll never participate in LOOT again.

The sale was set up adjacent to the second-floor jewelry gallery. It consisted of a series of square islands built from glass-and chrome display cases. The cases were packed with jewelry. I mean: stuffed. Overflowing. Jammed. When I found my work in the jumble, I discovered that one of my brooches was lying on top of the necklace, and all four pieces were squeezed off to the side of a case.

My impression was that the jewelry at LOOT was treated just like merchandise. A comparison to jewelry at department stores was inescapable. The density of objects was the same as at Barney’s or Macy’s. Worse still, the work was treated altogether too casually. Jewelry was lying on top of cases, unattended. And, in my case at least, it was obvious that my work had been thrown carelessly back into the case after someone had taken a look.

In a museum, I expect all objects on display to be treated with a measure of respect. And the struggle to get studio jewelry displayed properly has been annoyingly persistent. For decades, jewelry has been smushed together in undersized cases or relegated to closet-like spaces off the main rooms. I suppose the thinking was that jewelry is small, so it doesn’t need as much space as, say, a textile sculpture or a ceramic vessel. I say: Bullshit! When you crowd any works of art together, it has the effect of diminishing it all. Museums rejected the practice of skying (hanging paintings cheek-by-jowl all the way to the ceiling) long ago. Installations of contemporary art are spacious and elegant, with lots of breathing room for every painting and sculpture. In contrast, an installation of craft objects placed only inches from each other sends a clear message: this work is not important as those paintings in the next room.

No wonder studio jewelers get irritated.

By its very name, MAD makes the claim that craft is art. In a sense, MAD is supposed to be an advocate for the value of good studio craft by insisting it is as thoughtful and compelling as any work of art. And one way the case is made is to make sure craft objects are not displayed like merchandise. To do so undercuts a basic mission of the institution. Furthermore, to treat craft as merchandise is to suggest that, well, it really IS merchandise.

You can be as cynical about the art marketplace as you want. After all, galleries are stores of a certain kind. But museums are not. An art museum preserves material for posterity, on the assumption that it’s more valuable to the culture than rolls of toilet paper and golf clubs. And you can be all sarcastic about those antiseptic white rooms. It’s true they serve as frames, announcing that whatever is contained therein is art, and you had better not touch it. But the physical space also clears a mental space. Without distractions, without clutter, you are afforded the opportunity to regard works of art carefully. You get the space to consider. What you expect is that the artwork will reward your leisurely contemplation. Good work always does.

Does studio jewelry reward sustained contemplation? Like I said, good work always does. I think of Kiff Slemmons’s wonderful neckpieces made of pencils, recalling and riffing on Plains Indian ornaments made from porcupine quills. Or Anika Smulovitz’s obscured versions of historical jewelry. Or Thomas Gentille’s gorgeous eggshell inlay bracelet, with its provocative combination of intricate surface and chunky form. These great pieces of jewelry give you multiple layers of meaning or intense visual pleasure, or both.

To be properly understood, these works need room. True, they could be fascinating when placed on a body and circulated during social intercourse. But it’s nearly impossible to look closely at jewelry at a party, or walking down the street. The best jewelry will work just fine in these circumstances, but the opportunity to linger and lose yourself in thought isn’t there.

I now understand why Helen Drutt objects to LOOT so strenuously. No matter how good the jewelry might be, it cannot be experienced in its fullness if it’s treated like merchandise. It’s just another piece of stuff for sale, no better than any other piece of stuff. Under the circumstances, studio jewelry’s special value vanishes. And there’s no way that MAD should engage in the devaluation of studio jewelry. Period.

For many years, I have worked hard to establish that good studio jewelry has a unique value-added. It’s more than diamonds-and-gold, and more than costume jewelry. If studio jewelers do not insist on clarifying that value when they present their work to the public, then the public will think all jewelry is equivalent. I refuse to participate in any enterprise that feeds that confusion. No more LOOT for me.

I just read a fascinating book about a theory of decoration. It’s “Rethinking Decoration: Pleasure & Ideology in the Visual Arts, by David Brett (Cambridge University Press, 2005). Sarah Burgess recommended the book to me – Thanks, Sarah!

Brett is a very well-read fellow, with a decent knowledge of the history of aesthetics as well as any number of other fields. In this book, he’s thinking about decoration, but the problems that decoration face are almost exactly the same as those faced by craft. So, any traction he can get for decoration will probably apply to craft.

Brett realized that a theory of decoration must be different from any past or current art theories. It must accommodate a broader range of experience, including the somatic. At present, there is precious little theorizing about bodily aesthetic experience, except perhaps in the specialized cases of feminist and queer theory.

Brett also realized that decoration is often a form of coded social meaning, a fact that James Trilling (in “Ornament: A Modern Perspective”) ignores. Instead of radically narrowing the realm of decoration, Brett’s sense is expansive. Brett thinks of the social codes embedded in ornament as a form of ideology, which is normally understood as power relations. But he thinks mostly about pleasure.

To arrive at a broad definition of pleasure, Brett investigates pre- and post-natal experience, when the infant supposedly cannot distinguish between self and environment. The deep desires and pleasures of this oceanic experience are the basis for many later pleasure, Brett claims, and serve as the foundation for his theory of the many pleasures afforded by decoration. It’s a very interesting thesis.

At the end of the book, he contributes a chapter on craft. For the most part, he relies on Dormer’s sense of tacit knowledge – that which is known, but cannot be explained – but he draws a rather different conclusion. In the end, Brett declares that modern ornament is weak because so many of the traditional forms have been jettisoned. Obviously, he hadn’t seen the recent revival in decoration in jewelry, textiles and ceramics. The most recent piece of craft he illustrates is a raku vase by Lee Segal, made in 1991.

Some of the research he cites is shaky: what does Julia Kristeva know about the pre-natal experience? He takes no account of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. And to be truly persuasive, his theory of the pleasures of ornament would have to speak to an experience that can be only located in the regard of ornament, not the other visual arts. His conclusions on this issue are murky.

“Rethinking Decoration” is not a fast read, but anybody who is serious about clearing an intellectual space for craft should read this book. The immediate comparison is to Adamson’s “Thinking Through Craft.” Adamson spent most of his book calling up one art theory after another, ultimately writing that he couldn’t think of much to say about his favorite Art Carpenter chair. I thought that was a massive cop-out. Brett, in contrast, takes relatively little from art theory, except as a foil to his own thinking. Because of this refusal, I find Brett’s book far more appropriate to the problems of thinking about craft.

“Rethinking Decoration” can be found on Amazon.com. Don’t make the same mistake I made and buy a copy at full price! I paid over $100. Used and resale copies are much cheaper.

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Driving back from northern Vermont this week, I decided to take a detour and see Mass MoCA. I have never been there before, and after 11 years of its existence, I figured it was time to visit. North Adams is not far from where I grew up, and it was one of the stops along my father’s business routes.

It’s weird, going to these vast art venues. I always have inappropriate responses. I know I’m supposed to be immersed in the spectacle, and be grateful that such places exist. But my first impression was of great sadness. Here was a factory, a place where Americans had good jobs making things. It grew up as a textile printing factory, and then an electrical components manufacturer. At one time, more than 5000 people worked there. By the 1980s, Sprague Electronics had trouble competing with overseas factories – or so the official history reads. But the unwritten stories of failed American factories tend to be much more complex: new managements shutter facilities that don’t offer sufficient return on investment; militant unions demand pay scales that render whole regions uncompetitive, owners fail to reinvest in capital equipment; research and development is underfunded; mismanagement undercuts sales. And so good jobs vanish into thin air. The factory shut down in 1985. Mass MoCA is designed to reinvigorate the local economy, it’s true, but the museum represents the ongoing shift from production to consumption in the American economy. I couldn’t help thinking of all that loss as I strolled about Mass MoCA’s vast white halls, now so respectfully silent.

The big show on the first floor was by Petah Coyne. Coyne is famous for using stuffed animals and artificial flowers, along with wire, wax, and who knows what-all. In one large room, five or six large stuffed-bird & fake flower sculptures filled the space. The central device was birds being engulfed by flowers, which is an interesting image – poetic, contradictory, and ultimately inexplicable.

Petah Coyne, "Untitled 1240 (Black Cloud)"

This is big-money art. These massive object/installations are destined for the highest levels of the international art marketplace. Coyne could not effectively make these constructions herself. She needs an atelier – a workshop, if you will – to make them. (I suspect she started out working alone, but she now has a crew of assistants. See http://ameliaishmael.com/read/articles/petah_coyne.html for a discussion about her fabrication methods.) Coyne runs a labor-based operation, even though the materials and techniques are not traditional to either sculpture or craft. Still, the objects are very physical and labor-intensive. The accumulation of thousands of waxy flowers or hundreds of layers of wire give Coyne’s work much of its power.

Physicality and labor-intensity. These are craft virtues, are they not? I discern precisely the same attributes in a Richard Scott Newman demi-lune table or a Pat Flynn nail brooch. So… when do Newman and Flynn get invited to the party?

Mass MoCA also has three floors of wall “drawings” by Sol Lewitt. Lewitt is valorized as the “father of conceptual art,” according to the lady giving the interpretive tour. This claim was made because Lewitt championed the idea that ideas should be the basis of art-making. His wall drawings actually consist of a carefully drafted set of instructions, so the artist’s hand can be removed entirely from the process. At Mass MoCA, the primacy of idea and the disengagement of the artist from actual fabrication are held up as great achievements of 20^th-century art. Apparently, Minimalism still rules in North Adams.

Two qualities struck me about the Lewitt works. First, they were all very well made. They reminded me of nothing so much as a coloring book done by an extremely anal-retentive child. Super-sharp edges; perfectly uniform paint surfaces on the drywall; lines of precise widths. It was… craft! I got the impression that Lewitt was a distant god, and his worshippers express their devotion by drawing with great exactitude. So, I started thinking of making a really BAD Lewitt – bungling the dimensions, blurring the edges, working on a crappy old wall with screw holes and Victorian-era moldings. Funny how the presence of too much control just makes me want to fuck things up. (And I’m a control freak!!) But I was good – I didn’t touch anything, even though the temptation was severe. I put my thumbprint on an Ad Reinhardt painting once, but that’s another story…

Secondly, all the Lewitt drawings seen in repetition began to look decorative. Especially the later works, which are actually paintings, have festive colors and almost-psychedelic patterns. But even the early works started to look like very tasteful, very restrained wallpaper. I doubt that was his intention, but the effect was unmistakable. Hmm. Think of it: Sol Lewitt, decorative artist.

Oh, well. There I was at a temple of holy Minimalism, thinking irrelevant thoughts. I can’t help it.

To make matters worse, I didn’t even eat lunch in North Adams. No boost for the local economy from me. I drove on to Pitttsfield, and had a burger there.

I’m just back from the SNAG conference in Houston, still cleaning up loose ends. The conference was one of the best I have attended in recent years: lots of good speakers and at least two excellent exhibitions. Normally I go to SNAG with low expectations, since my interest in provocative discourse is still not widely shared by the membership. So it’s nice to have my expectations blown away.

Caroline Broadhead was the keynote speaker. Her delivery was quiet and understated, and sometimes I couldn’t hear her very well. But her body of work was very interesting, and occasionally quite beautiful. She traced her development from jeweler to installation artist. For her, a dress is a proxy for a person. Over the years, her dresses became increasingly dematerialized, moving from actual garments to shadows to images of shadows. In the end, there was no connection to jewelry at all. I suppose she is a model for turning craft into art. For my money, Broadhead is a better artist than Beverly Semmes, the uber-meister of dress imagery. She explores variations on the body and its trace, never resorting to a single format that exploits the same basic format over and over.

My other favorite lecture was Kristen Beeler’s extended meditation on beauty. (Beauty was a big topic at Houston. Kim Cridler’s exhibit “Extreme Beauty” was a visual exploration of the same theme.) Beeler’s talk was not just a discussion of her own work, with ideas thrown in here and there to illuminate the art. In fact, her speech was the inverse: a discussion of beauty with her work used to illuminate the subject. It seemed far less egotistical than the normal artist’s talk, which was refreshing. I hope Beeler revises her speech for publication someday: I would love to think about it in the way that only text can afford. A speech is like a musical performance. It’s here and then it’s gone, and all you have left is your own memory. Given the overload of information at a typical conference, I cannot recall the detail and density of any one speech. So… Kristen? We’re waiting.

Gabriel Craig’s talk on the moral potential of craft was not a crowd favorite. But I admire the guy’s courage in advancing a position that is usually ridiculed, even in the craftworld. Glenn Adamson scoffs at craft moralism, noting that the Nazis used craft in their volkisch propaganda, and that didn’t prevent Germans from committing all kinds of atrocities. Thus craft is not good for you. I think Adamson’s argument is specious, but it’s tough to argue that craft is, in fact, morally good. In contrast to Adamson, Craig said that certain types of craft practices – craftivism, ethical materials sourcing, the movement against sweated labor, development of local markets – are all forms of moral behavior. His agenda is relentlessly liberal, and certainly would not make points with most Republicans. Since I’m a closet moralist from way back (most college hippies in the 60s were moralists), I’m drawn to Craig’s argument. Like him, I’m a fan of Ruskin and Morris. And like him, I believe craft is an agent of the good.

I’m bothered by Craig’s framing of the issue as a moral imperative. The idea of the imperative goes back to Kant. As defined in Wikipedia (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative), Kant’s categorical imperative “denotes an absolute, unconditional requirement that asserts its authority in all circumstances.” I don’t buy Kant’s argument, and the idea of an imperative strikes me as intellectual arm-twisting. So there was something coercive in Craig’s argument, which I think many in the audience sensed. But still, props to Craig for making the effort.

Ana Lopez did a fine job of organizing the Education Dialogue, at which I spoke. (My talk was primarily about the history of craft education in the U.S. before 1945.) The other speakers all focused on the intersection of craft practice and scholarship, which is now an essential part of college-level craft instruction. Lopez’s account of the “object report,” an analytical procedure developed by material culture scholar Jules Prown, was very interesting.

As for entertainment, I modeled a Robert Longyear necklace at the “Exhibition in Motion” at the MFA Houston. Thanks to several ounces of hair product and a pair of vintage sunglasses, I’m told I cut quite the figure out on the floor. Look for a photo on my Facebook page: Bruce Metcalf as wild & crazy guy! Dang!

Anyway, the multitudes who decided not to attend SNAG 2010 missed a very good conference. Congrats to Sandie Zilker and Diane Falkenhagen for their good taste and hard work.

A proposal has been made at the Cleveland Institute of Art to fold enameling into the jewelry/metals program. The following is a letter I mailed to Mr. David Deming, the President of the CIA. I believe anyone who is concerned with the preservation of craft skills in the academy should be alarmed by this proposal, and interested in my arguments against the idea.

January 6, 2010

Mr. David Deming, President

Cleveland Institute of Art

11141 East Blvd.

Cleveland, Ohio 44106

Dear Mr. Deming.

I recently saw Gretchen Goss at the Philadelphia Craft Show, and she told me that the Cleveland Institute of Art is considering merging enameling with its jewelry/metals program. I’m very familiar with the CIA and its craft programs, since I taught jewelry at Kent State University from 1981 to 1991, and I count both Ms. Goss and Matthew Hollern among my friends. I also have a detailed knowledge of enameling, jewelry and silversmithing, having just completed writing Makers: A History of American Studio Craft with Janet Koplos. And, way back in my distant past, I once tried to teach myself how to enamel, so I know firsthand how demanding the craft is. I was a lousy enamellist, by the way.

While it might be tempting to consider enameling as an adjunct or subset of jewelry-making, it is not. It is a separate medium entirely, requiring an altogether distinct body of knowledge and skills. To control enamels, one must know all the techniques – from wet inlay to plique-a-jour – as well as the temperature at which every single color matures in the kiln. One must know how each color reacts to others, how they look when underfired or overfired, how they work over foils, and much more. This is not knowledge that can be transferred in two or three assignments while concentrating on jewelry-making. It is specific, and it is deep. It requires sustained practice and experimentation. In terms of education, the only way enameling can be done justice is to treat it as a separate discipline.

I’m sure you know that the Cleveland Institute of Art was the epicenter of enameling as a studio practice in the United States. Bostonian Lauren Martin and his students did a fair amount of enameling in early decades of the 20^th century, but they had none of Kenneth Bates’s obsession with the medium, none of his forceful curiosity about technique, and none of his missionary zeal to popularize the craft. Later, Edward Winter and William Harper made their own contributions to enameling while they lived in Cleveland, and John Paul Miller’s enameled gold jewels still astonish. The CIA has a central place in the history of the medium.

Study of the history of studio craft shows that the transmission of skill has migrated from trade and industry to college-level art education. Silversmithing, weaving, bookmaking, glassblowing: all were preserved or revived in academia, which is now the primary repository for training and information for each of these crafts. Luckily, information is dispersed across a number of institutions, so the closure of any one program does not threaten the survival of an entire craft discipline.

This is not true of enameling. Most of the degree-granting programs in enameling (Kent State and San Diego State University were the last two MFA programs in the country) have been shuttered. The last school to offer expert training, a studio dedicated to enameling alone, and a BFA degree in the discipline is the CIA.

Which brings up a question: to what extent is higher education responsible for cultural preservation? If an institution is the last remaining repository of best practices and comprehensive information, does it bear a responsibility to preserve the discipline?

I submit that it does. Higher education must answer to society’s highest aspirations. There is a cultural DNA that is directly analogous to biological DNA – and we are all aware of the dangers of the extinction of species. Enameling is part of our cultural DNA. Does the CIA wish to force the extinction of a discipline? While my rhetorical question overstates the case, you get the idea. The Cleveland Institute of Art is now the sole institutional conservator of high-level enameling in the entire country. Educational fashion aside, the CIA is the last keeper of the field.

Is that a liability? I’m sure some educators will tell you that it is; the CIA must change with the times; consolidation is necessary; the post-studio model is the future of art education. I beg to differ. The post-studio model is very fashionable right now. Art schools and departments rush willy-nilly to adopt it. But does anybody point out the downside?

As you know, John Baldessari was the pioneer of post-studio art education at Cal Arts in the late 1970s. In his graduate seminar, he introduced students to a system of inquiry and critique that was perfectly suited to the strategies of conceptual art. Mediums were freely selected to match ideas, and expertise no longer seemed necessary. But there were three hidden assumptions. First, students were assumed to have had a basic training in the visual arts and its mediums: the classic undergraduate education of the time. Second, conceptual art was assumed to be the most legitimate art practice, trumping all medium-based art forms like painting, sculpture or, for that matter, crafts. And third, all mediums were assumed to be disposable.

But what happens when the post-studio model is forced upon students who do not have that classic education? What if the students are undergraduates themselves, without the foundation in the visual arts that Baldessari could count on? And what if post-conceptual art becomes passé, as it surely will? What is left for academia to transmit if it has discarded its expertise in mediums?

An inherent problem with the post-studio model is de-skilling. Students complete their education without the knowledge of how to make things. At that point, their artistic toolkit is half empty. When art changes, they lack the tools – the skills – to adapt.

At the Cleveland Institute of Art, you could declare that your mission is to equip every student with a complete toolkit. Not just intelligence and criticality, but skills to give ideas tangible form. Every medium remains an option, no matter what makes it into Artforum. Artists will rediscover mediums and use them for their own purposes. Certainly, that’s the case with craft. Kids who are fed up with the gallery system and the pretentiousness of high art are turning to craft, and doing very interesting things. Have you seen microrevolt? Marianne Jorgensen’s pink tank cozy? If crocheting can be recruited for current artistic practice, so can enameling.

I don’t know what arguments will be advanced to justify folding enameling into jewelry/metals. Efficiency, perhaps, or declining enrollments. But you could equally well look to the history of enameling in Cleveland, or the role of academia as a conservator of knowledge and culture. You could stand against de-skilling. You could assert the relevance of craft for artists who are increasingly dissatisfied with spectacle, big commerce, and the dematerialization of art. You could decide that enameling is a program that makes the Cleveland Institute of Art unique, and use it as part of your branding strategy. There are many positives about enameling at the CIA, and I hope I give you cause to reconsider them.

Sincerely,

Bruce Metcalf

Studio jeweler and independent scholar

The Sunday New York Times (December 27, 2009) had an interesting article by Nicholas Fox Weber about a Bauhaus student who wound up working for the Nazis. It turns out that Franz Erlich had been imprisoned at Buchenwald as a Communist in 1937, and insinuated himself into the joinery workshop and began to design. Apparently the SS liked his work, for he continued to design officers’ quarters and furnishings for Nazi officials even after his release in 1939. The photo above shows some furniture he designed for an officer’s residence. (The article is based on a 2009 exhibit At the Neue Museum in Weimar.)

Weber’s article is headlined: “Deadly Style: Bauhaus’s Nazi Connection,” and he agonizes about the prospect of a Bauhausler in collaboration with the Nazis. He writes, “The thought that anyone connected to the Bauhaus could have helped promote Hitler’s regime or design its camps is distinctly painful to people who study or care about this extraordinary school…”

It’s odd that intellectuals who would dismiss the Ruskinian ideal of a moral component to craft could imagine that attending the Bauhaus would act as some kind of moral inoculation. Several prominent Futurists aligned themselves with Mussolini, and more than a few Italian Fascist buildings were designed in the International Style during the 30s. Even the Nazis, committed to a virulent anti-modernism in the fine arts, believed in the possibilities of industrial technology for the betterment of the ordinary citizen, exactly as taught at the Bauhaus. Dr. Porsche’s Volkswagen is one example. Nor were the Nazis above using the Bauhaus style when it served their purposes: the public spaces of the dirigible Hindenberg were furnished with ultralight bent-metal chairs derived from Breuer’s designs.

Which all goes to suggest that art, design and craft can be applied to political ends, even to the service of evil. Why would that be a surprise? I guess some observers fear that any association with the Nazis would contaminate the larger Bauhaus project. But I have always thought that the Bauhaus contained a potent strain of authoritarianism and intolerance, which eventually hardened into a kind of intellectual fascism. Its power has faded now, but anyone who remembers the response of hard-ass modernist architects to Venturi’s first postmodernism buildings will know exactly what I mean.

Weber’s article is a fascinating footnote to the history of design, and it raises some interesting questions. It can be read online at: www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/arts/design/27webe.html?scp=1&sq=Bauhaus’s Nazi Connection&st=cse

UPDATE: WordPress, the blog engine for CraftGadfly, was upgraded today from version 2.6.1 to 2.8.6. This upgrade was necessary as my web page had been hacked during early September of this year. This was probably possible due to security issues with WordPress 2.6.1. In addition to the upgrade of WordPress, special codes were added to encrypt “cookies” left on computers so that the login could be “remembered”.

As a result, there will possibly be residual effects for users who have created accounts on this blog (27 as of today). Some people may have chosen to have their computer “remember” their login name and passwords. If so, the stored name & password pairs will not work and they will have to manually log in the next time they try. It should work as it used to after they do this and have their computer re-remember their name/password.