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Object Philosophy 101
24 Plays6 years ago
Scholar and curator Glenn Adamson reminds us how important it is to pay attention to the objects in our immediate proximity in this episode keyed to Art Carpenter’s Wishbone chair
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Transcript
Introduction to Custodial Relationships with Objects
00:00:00
Speaker
If you really do have a concern for the objects in your life, then it might well be that you feel like you have a custodial relationship to them.
00:00:09
Speaker
And I actually think that's quite an important thing.
00:00:22
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
00:00:25
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I'm your host, Ben Miller.
00:00:26
Speaker
My guest today is Glenn Adamson.
00:00:28
Speaker
Glenn is a writer and curator who serves as editor-at-large for the magazine Antiques.
00:00:34
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He's the author, most recently, of Fewer Better Things, The Hidden Wisdom of Objects.
Significance of Art Carpenter's Wishbone Chair
00:00:39
Speaker
Some of his writing he does while sitting in today's Curious Object, a chair made in California in 1970 by Art Carpenter.
00:00:47
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It's colloquially referred to as the wishbone chair.
00:00:51
Speaker
I was excited when Glenn suggested this chair to talk about.
00:00:54
Speaker
I'm an antique silver dealer, and it's rare in my business to handle a piece less than a hundred years old, so this is far outside my area of expertise and experience.
00:01:03
Speaker
But the history of objects doesn't magically stop a hundred years ago, and Glenn has a sharp perspective on how to think about newer objects in the context of the older objects that we think of as antiques.
00:01:14
Speaker
Glenn's wishbone chair is one of a pair.
00:01:17
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Its mate is in the permanent collection of the Yale University Art Gallery.
00:01:20
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You can see pictures of it at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast.
00:01:24
Speaker
I mentioned last episode that we were going to try something new on Curious Objects.
00:01:28
Speaker
Michael Diaz-Griffith is joining the podcast as co-host, and he and I are starting with a chat about this episode's Curious Object and what we want to learn about it, right after this message.
00:01:42
Speaker
Interested in learning more about your fine art, jewelry, furniture, and decorative arts?
00:01:46
Speaker
Freeman's many auction and appraisal specialists are always available to help you determine the value of your collection and to offer advice on how to navigate the reputedly intimidating auction process.
00:01:56
Speaker
Head to freemansauction.com to learn more and to get connected with the right member of our team.
American Studio Craft Movement
00:02:11
Speaker
Sure.
00:02:11
Speaker
Good.
00:02:12
Speaker
Okay.
00:02:12
Speaker
Okay.
00:02:13
Speaker
Well, Michael, welcome back to Curious Objects.
00:02:15
Speaker
Thank you so much, Ben.
00:02:17
Speaker
It's a pleasure to be here.
00:02:18
Speaker
Part of the reason I'm interested to talk to you about this in particular is that you have your finger on the pulse of the decorative arts world in a way that, with this sort of material, I feel like I'm out of my depth.
00:02:32
Speaker
I'm not familiar with this concept of design that starts to enter the vocabulary.
00:02:36
Speaker
We're talking here about American studio furniture,
00:02:40
Speaker
Give me a gut check.
00:02:42
Speaker
What are we talking about here?
00:02:43
Speaker
Is this movement part of the continuum of American decorative arts history or does it stand apart?
00:02:49
Speaker
Well, you know, it's very kind of you to say I have my finger on the pulse of anything, Ben, so I want to thank you for that.
00:02:55
Speaker
I do think the American studio craft movement more explicitly ties the 20th century and perhaps the taste of the kinds of collectors we interact with and that we are with the past.
00:03:08
Speaker
In that sense, they're the inheritors of the arts and crafts movement.
00:03:11
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Yeah.
00:03:12
Speaker
And they stand apart from modern trends, even as they produce objects that may look modern or feel modern, like this
IKEA's Influence in Modern Design
00:03:18
Speaker
chair.
00:03:18
Speaker
I'll be interested to hear Glenn's thoughts about the transition from arts and crafts into American studio design.
00:03:26
Speaker
Because, I mean, the arts and crafts movement has a strong history in California, specifically.
00:03:33
Speaker
Yes, and yet, stylistically, this chair...
00:03:37
Speaker
does feel more connected, perhaps, to Scandinavian design than it does to the American arts and crafts movement.
00:03:43
Speaker
Can I... I want to put a pin in that, because...
00:03:49
Speaker
I'll just come out and say it.
00:03:51
Speaker
I'm an IKEA hater.
00:03:54
Speaker
You're not alone.
00:03:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:56
Speaker
I mean, maybe in the context of this podcast, that's not so shocking.
00:03:59
Speaker
But there are plenty of people who would say, well, why?
00:04:01
Speaker
What's your big problem with it?
00:04:03
Speaker
And look, I'll admit, I'm a bit stodgy about it.
00:04:06
Speaker
And...
00:04:08
Speaker
I don't like the idea of cheap, disposable, mass-produced furniture, and maybe that's because I'm a snob.
00:04:15
Speaker
In that I join you.
00:04:16
Speaker
Well, good.
00:04:17
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I'm glad I have company.
00:04:19
Speaker
IKEA design is really heavily rooted in mid-century Scandinavian ideas about design.
00:04:28
Speaker
It is.
00:04:28
Speaker
So sort of by association with IKEA and with all of the other, either IKEA knockoffs or the higher-end mass manufacturers who have taken their inspiration from IKEA, now the whole genre has just been tainted for me.
00:04:41
Speaker
And it's hard for me to look at mid-century, particularly Scandinavian-inspired furniture and not react with a little bit of a cringe.
00:04:51
Speaker
Yes, in part because you know what it leads to, right?
00:04:54
Speaker
Through mechanization, through a less sophisticated approach to materials, it leads to this sort of mass manufacture of cheap furniture that falls apart in your Brooklyn apartment.
00:05:07
Speaker
I mean, and that's a really nasty thing.
00:05:10
Speaker
And because it's minimalist, you know, and minimalism taken to an extreme becomes boring.
00:05:15
Speaker
Whereas with American studio crafts people who often with very critical dispositions kind of set them apart, set themselves apart from the mass manufacture of, you know, furniture and functional objects.
Craftsmanship vs. Mass Production
00:05:29
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to really do it in the old style.
00:05:32
Speaker
And there's a kind of global narrative built into the body of this object.
00:05:38
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So it's really operating between the local, the global, a kind of spirit of craftsmanship versus an aestheticism.
00:05:47
Speaker
I don't know.
00:05:48
Speaker
There are a lot of different dichotomies that are probably a little superficial if we take them at face value, but they allow us to look at tensions that exist in this work.
00:05:59
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting.
00:06:00
Speaker
I mean, I was drawn to a number of dichotomies as I was thinking about the chair.
00:06:06
Speaker
And you mentioned one of them, art and design.
00:06:09
Speaker
And maybe there's another pull to that, which is craft.
00:06:14
Speaker
Another one that you mentioned earlier, interest and importance.
00:06:18
Speaker
And this is, you know, you've got a chair that in this case is part of a pair, one of which belongs to an important art museum and one of which belongs to Yale, and the other of which belongs to a private collector, Glenn Adamson.
00:06:34
Speaker
And presumably the gallery is collecting it because they think it's important.
00:06:38
Speaker
And the collector is collecting it because he's interested in it.
Connections Through Objects
00:06:43
Speaker
I know that Glenn's research and his taste contributed to Yale's acquisition in this case.
00:06:48
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And he is a museum person.
00:06:50
Speaker
I mean, he's worked for museums.
00:06:52
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He's curated at museums.
00:06:54
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And we know that collectors look to museums to sort of, not just as tastemakers, of course, but as arbiters of historical narratives, means of interpreting the past that inform their collecting.
00:07:09
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And I think it's why this is interesting is the canon for 20th century material is still being developed, right?
00:07:19
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We're...
00:07:20
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probably convinced that this chair is, if not technically antique, that is 100 years old or older, it's an antique of tomorrow.
00:07:29
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Yet at the same time, Glenn owns one of these chairs and sits in it and uses it and has it at his desk instead of some other chair.
00:07:38
Speaker
And so this is another distinction that I found interesting or another dichotomy between the practical and the academic.
00:07:44
Speaker
And Glenn is sort of the perfect person to talk about this with because he's doing both at the same time.
00:07:50
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He's writing about the chair from the chair.
00:07:52
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I mean, it doesn't get more meta than that.
00:07:55
Speaker
No, and I think, I mean, I think we've all read Glenn.
00:07:59
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He's in the magazine Antiques, is an esteemed researcher.
00:08:03
Speaker
And I know that he thinks about this distinction between art, craft, and design a lot while sitting in that chair and writing.
00:08:11
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:08:11
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So what else do you think I should ask him?
00:08:14
Speaker
I mean, I think that...
00:08:18
Speaker
We haven't discussed whether antiques are, quote, green very much together, but it seems to come up in conversation a lot.
00:08:28
Speaker
Like, other
Glenn Adamson and Art Carpenter's Craftsmanship
00:08:29
Speaker
people have asked us this.
00:08:30
Speaker
All right, well, thanks, Michael.
00:08:32
Speaker
I'm going to check in with you after I've talked with Glenn and touch base about what I heard.
00:08:36
Speaker
Yeah, have a great interview.
00:08:41
Speaker
All right, let's kick things off with Glenn Adamson.
00:08:43
Speaker
When I first talked with Glenn about curious objects, I asked him if there was a particular object he'd be excited to talk about, and he went straight to, of all things, a chair.
00:08:52
Speaker
It's a chair by, you're not going to believe this, but the maker's name actually is Art Carpenter.
00:08:59
Speaker
That's just an amazing, he was born for it.
00:09:03
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It sounds too good to be true.
00:09:05
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So Arthur Espinay Carpenter.
00:09:09
Speaker
And it is one of a pair made in 1970.
00:09:12
Speaker
The other one is actually at the Yale University Art Gallery in the collection there.
00:09:18
Speaker
So the story is that the curator at Yale, Pat Kane, found the pair of chairs at an antiques fair in California and recognized them because she had known of Carpenter through my research when I was just a grad student.
00:09:36
Speaker
And she very kindly offered to
00:09:39
Speaker
allow me to buy one of the chairs pretty inexpensively, and then she acquired the other one for the collection.
00:09:45
Speaker
That's interesting.
00:09:46
Speaker
So she was aware of the chairs because of the work that you had done.
00:09:50
Speaker
How did you initially come across Art Carpenter and the Wishbone Chair?
00:09:55
Speaker
So art is a whole group of craftspeople I was interested in when I was doing my dissertation research.
00:10:02
Speaker
And that is work that ultimately ended up being published in my book, Thinking Through Craft.
00:10:08
Speaker
And a lot of that is about this pastoral mode, as I called it, of countercultural craft practice.
00:10:15
Speaker
So how do you use skills and making things by hand as a way of building a lifestyle that you can live with, as it were, kind of a critical position in relation to mass production and industry.
00:10:29
Speaker
And Art is, or was, he's now passed away, but was a fantastic example of that.
00:10:35
Speaker
So he lived...
00:10:36
Speaker
on his own out in Bolinas, which was a kind of countercultural center, and made work by hand and spent his whole life at it and was very happy doing it too.
00:10:47
Speaker
What does the chair actually look like?
00:10:50
Speaker
He called it the wishbone chair.
00:10:52
Speaker
And the reason for that is that if you look at it from the side, it looks like it has a kind of split shape like a wishbone.
00:11:00
Speaker
And it's made using a very clever technique of tapered laminations, which sounds a little technical, but all it means is that he made the legs by tapering down veneers of wood and then gluing them together.
00:11:12
Speaker
So it has a kind of long, slender attenuation.
00:11:16
Speaker
And it has leather strap upholstery, very 1960s, you could say.
00:11:20
Speaker
Yeah, and it's made of a local California walnut, local to him, that is.
00:11:27
Speaker
So it really speaks of the place and time where it was made.
00:11:30
Speaker
Right.
00:11:31
Speaker
The shape of it is sort of interesting, as the name suggests, because the front legs are the arms.
00:11:41
Speaker
Right.
00:11:42
Speaker
We think of those elements as being separate.
00:11:46
Speaker
You have your four legs, you have your stretcher, you have your seat, you have your back, you have your splat.
00:11:55
Speaker
But in this case, at least some of those elements are combined into one.
00:12:00
Speaker
That's right, and I find it quite comfortable to write in, which is maybe a little counterintuitive because you'd think you'd want arms, but I actually like the fact that it slides away beneath me and I can rest my arms on the desk where I'm working, so it's kind of perfect for me.
00:12:14
Speaker
You know, you could also say, if you wanted to get design historical about it, that it's derived from Scandinavian design, so not any particular one precedent, but it has this kind of soft set of lines that was...
00:12:30
Speaker
called the California Roundover style, memorably, back in the 60s and 70s.
00:12:34
Speaker
And art was really the primary developer of that idiom.
00:12:38
Speaker
And it was in turn derived from the Scandinavian teak furniture that was, you know, absolutely swamping the American market in the 1950s and 60s.
00:12:47
Speaker
Right.
00:12:48
Speaker
Is it also related to the sort of older arts and crafts tradition that was so popular in California?
00:12:54
Speaker
Yes, maybe more distantly.
00:12:56
Speaker
You know, you might think about Green and Green, for example, the great carvers and furniture makers and house builders from Pasadena.
00:13:04
Speaker
I think that might have been a more distant thing in Art's mind, but he certainly would have been aware of it.
00:13:08
Speaker
Yeah.
00:13:10
Speaker
Now, I want to read a quote for you that is from an article that you wrote a few months ago and just get your reaction to that and ask you to maybe expand on it a bit.
Environmental Consciousness and Antique Objects
00:13:23
Speaker
You wrote,
00:13:25
Speaker
Are you sitting comfortably?
00:13:27
Speaker
If so, how much do you know about the chair that's holding you off the ground, what it's made from, and what processes were involved?
00:13:33
Speaker
Where it was made, and by whom?
00:13:35
Speaker
What materials are present in the chair, and how were they extracted from the planet?
00:13:39
Speaker
If you're like most people, you will have difficulty answering these questions, even though they seem pretty basic.
00:13:44
Speaker
Now, I read that and my mind actually immediately went to one of my favorite writers, a man named Wendell Berry, who is interested in the relationship between individuals and the land and resources that we rely on, whether we know it or not.
00:14:02
Speaker
And so often we don't know it.
00:14:05
Speaker
We don't really know where a lot of the things that we use in our daily lives come from or what goes into producing them.
00:14:15
Speaker
and so it's interesting to see writing this way about a chair which you know i mean i'm sure you're familiar with the um the sort of slogan refrain that antique dealers like to to use go green buy antiques so tell me are you in this chair are you sitting comfortably where does it come from um what did it take to to bring that chair to you
00:14:41
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's a great set of questions to ask about your environment in general and the shocking state of ignorance in which we all live about the things around us is really what I'm trying to get at in that recent book, Fewer Better Things.
00:14:57
Speaker
You know, there's a kind of broader set of questions here, which is impossible to address through craftsmanship alone because craft is inevitably a small scale and relatively expensive way of getting things done.
00:15:10
Speaker
But, you know, if you can achieve it, then certainly knowing the person that made an object in your life and knowing their story, as I'm lucky enough to know our carpenter, you know, that's a real scenario.
00:15:26
Speaker
And if you can't have, you know, a fully handcrafted environment, which, of course, most people can't, it's possible to at least cultivate curiosity about,
00:15:38
Speaker
um the things around you and hopefully use that curiosity to find things out and have a more integral more informed relationship to to um to your physical reality yeah so let's expand on that a little bit um because i think that one reaction that some people maybe not listeners to this podcast um but um but maybe some of them and maybe some of their friends and family one reaction that many people have to seeing a
00:16:06
Speaker
either an antique that is revered, that's valuable, that's seen as significant or important, or in this case, a piece that's not strictly speaking an antique, but that fits into this category of art and design.
00:16:22
Speaker
One reaction is to say, well,
00:16:25
Speaker
what's the big deal?
00:16:26
Speaker
You know, I have plenty of chairs in my house.
00:16:31
Speaker
They're perfectly comfortable.
00:16:33
Speaker
They're cheap.
00:16:35
Speaker
They're serving their purpose.
00:16:38
Speaker
I don't have to worry about them too much.
00:16:39
Speaker
I don't have to stress out about having children running around and bumping into them and damaging them and costing me lots of money.
00:16:50
Speaker
Why does a chair like this matter?
00:16:54
Speaker
Why should we care about it?
00:16:58
Speaker
Well, I think there's a couple of questions
Social and Emotional Connections in Craft
00:17:00
Speaker
there.
00:17:00
Speaker
One is the specifics of why this particular chair matters.
00:17:03
Speaker
And I guess I'll just go ahead and say it matters because it matters to me.
00:17:08
Speaker
In other words, I think this is a very personal set of considerations.
00:17:13
Speaker
And I happen to have met Art.
00:17:15
Speaker
I happen to know a lot about
00:17:17
Speaker
the whole story of post-war American craft and specifically the craft movement of the Bay Area.
00:17:23
Speaker
So it's very meaningful to me.
00:17:25
Speaker
But one of the key points that I would want to make is that that is a totally individual matter.
00:17:32
Speaker
So I wouldn't say everybody needs to just do what I do and learn about the post-war studio craft movement in the USA.
00:17:40
Speaker
The reason it matters is not just because of
00:17:44
Speaker
the ecological implications of caring more about the things in your life, but also because those things can form a connection between you and other people.
00:17:54
Speaker
So it's a kind of social matrix that I'm after, the way that things can embody connections, even political connections, but also emotional connections to other people.
00:18:07
Speaker
And I feel that insofar as we're possibly losing our collective knowledge,
00:18:12
Speaker
Material intelligence and material affinity that we're also losing that social glue that social adhesive Yeah, that's a really interesting way to look at it.
00:18:23
Speaker
I mean the Antiques world is very much about the relationships between collectors dealers curators the Events that we all go to together the shows that we attend
00:18:38
Speaker
the backroom conversations between collectors and dealers, it seems like most of the fun of finding these objects and buying them is it's not even necessarily in having them and looking at them, although that's important.
00:18:54
Speaker
It's also about talking about them and gossiping about them and having fun with other people who like to geek out about them with you.
00:19:07
Speaker
Yeah, and in that way, it's just like any other social scene or, you know, interest group.
00:19:13
Speaker
You know, it's not that different from people who surf together or people who mountain climb together or people who, you know, restore hot rods, you know.
00:19:21
Speaker
And I think all of these kinds of social relationships are kind of what make culture go round, so they're to be celebrated and supported.
00:19:32
Speaker
I do think antiques are also special because there's a kind of layering between
00:19:36
Speaker
those present-day relationships that you might have with, let's say, dealers or writers or other collectors or museum curators, and then the set of relationships that you have with the past.
00:19:47
Speaker
So there's a kind of imaginative link back to the 18th century or the 19th century, and you can cultivate a lot of knowledge about that and use the antique object as a way of, I suppose, thinking about how you got to where you are
00:20:04
Speaker
So that's really what I've been trying to write about in my column for the magazine.
00:20:08
Speaker
You know, how do we understand past objects in relation to our present concerns, you know, without understanding them only in that way?
Future Cultural Significance of the Wishbone Chair
00:20:16
Speaker
Obviously, they have their own context and their own reality, and that should be respected.
00:20:21
Speaker
You know, we should be good historians in that sense.
00:20:23
Speaker
But I still think that we can selectively direct our attention to certain things in the past because they prompt thoughts about where we are in the present.
00:20:34
Speaker
This chair is not particularly old on the scale of antique furniture.
00:20:41
Speaker
Do you think that in 50, 100, 200 years, people will be sitting around in it thinking about this imagined past and wondering whether someone named Glenn Adamson might once have sat in it?
00:20:55
Speaker
That's a flattering way of putting the question, Ben.
00:20:59
Speaker
I would definitely say people will see the one in the Yale Art Gallery.
00:21:05
Speaker
I think Art Carpenter is very much a fixture already in the history of American furniture like Sam Maloof or Wendell Castle.
00:21:15
Speaker
So there's little doubt that people will be thinking about his work in the future.
00:21:19
Speaker
And it is amazing to think that actually next year will be the 50th anniversary of the chair.
00:21:24
Speaker
So it's not that old, but it's not that new either.
00:21:30
Speaker
But definitely I think that
00:21:33
Speaker
the trajectory of these objects as they've passed through time is itself fascinating.
00:21:38
Speaker
You know, what this chair meant when it was made, what it means now as a kind of relic of that scene, and then wondering what it might mean 50 years from now when it's twice as old as it is today.
00:21:49
Speaker
I think that's a big part of what makes me continue to explore this area.
00:21:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:55
Speaker
It's interesting to me that
00:21:57
Speaker
This pair of chairs is divided between you, a private collector, and a museum because you spoke about the personal relationship with it and the notion that the reason to own a chair like that is because it means something to you.
00:22:14
Speaker
But the reason for the Yale University Art Gallery to own that chair is presumably not because the Yale University Art Gallery has some sentimental attachment to it, but because it's
Museums and American Studio Furniture
00:22:29
Speaker
representative of something larger, because it serves some important role in the history of decorative arts and design.
00:22:39
Speaker
What do you think is...
00:22:41
Speaker
the importance of, to museums and institutions of collecting American studio furniture.
00:22:49
Speaker
What role does that play in the collection of a museum like the Yale Gallery?
00:22:56
Speaker
Yes, you're right.
00:22:57
Speaker
It's an interesting situation to have a pair of objects that split between the private sector, if that's what I am, and the museum.
00:23:05
Speaker
And there's a difference in function there.
00:23:07
Speaker
Although,
00:23:08
Speaker
You could also say there's an overlap because I think like a lot of collectors, I don't really consider myself a collector, but like a lot of owners of things that have some degree of significance, that's very much about story and narrative from my point of view.
00:23:26
Speaker
And I think that's true in museums too.
00:23:28
Speaker
They're trying to simply tell the narrative in a more objective and more comprehensive way.
00:23:33
Speaker
But I would say it's a matter of degree, difference of degree, rather than an absolute difference between the way that a knowledgeable collector goes about acquiring objects and the way that a museum does.
00:23:45
Speaker
And in fact, collectors and curators learn from one another all the time.
00:23:49
Speaker
You often have situations where...
00:23:51
Speaker
whole private collections are absorbed by museums and become major platforms for that institutional personality.
00:23:59
Speaker
So I do think there's a difference which has to do with systematicity and a more encyclopedic approach, but I think it's a continuum.
00:24:07
Speaker
It's not an absolute difference.
00:24:18
Speaker
Discover the story behind one of N.C.
00:24:20
Speaker
Weith's famed children's book illustrations, learn more about leading 19th century female artist Cecilia Bowe and her portrait of her childhood friend Ethel Paige, and browse over a dozen examples of Paul Evans' furniture gifted to his longtime assistant and fellow craftsman George Fry Jr. on the website of Freeman's, America's oldest auction house located in Center City, Philadelphia.
00:24:41
Speaker
On June 9, Freemans will host its biannual American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists auction, followed on June 10 by important design.
00:24:50
Speaker
Catalogs for these auctions, which both highlight and celebrate notable artists and craftsmen from Pennsylvania, are currently available online.
00:24:57
Speaker
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00:25:11
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There is a, I hope I'm getting this right, but Sequoia Miller in an introduction to a catalog of an exhibition that you helped to curate.
00:25:23
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She wrote a very interesting essay, I thought, and I wanted to read another quote to you this time from her and get your thoughts about it.
Art, Craft, and Design Distinctions
00:25:32
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She wrote...
00:25:33
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What is the craft movement if it is really just product design on the one hand and fine art on the other?
00:25:39
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Why even give it a name?
00:25:41
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It's interesting to me, in preparing for this conversation, I spoke with Michael Diaz-Griffith, and one of the things that we talked about was...
00:25:53
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this variety of dichotomies that this chair brings to mind for us.
00:26:00
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And I want to run through some of those, but the one that Sequoia Miller is speaking about here is this dichotomy between art and craft, or art and design, or maybe art versus design versus craft, maybe it's tripolar.
00:26:16
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Um, but I wanted to just sort of go in ankle deep with you and, uh, and ask what you think about that distinction and whether it's relevant and whether it's meaningful.
00:26:27
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Yeah, it's certainly relevant.
00:26:28
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Um, I, I do think that the tendency to think of art craft and design as this triad is probably a little misleading because it's much more helpful to think of those terms as being totally different in nature.
00:26:45
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So, for example, I think of craft very much as anchored in an activity in skilled making, whereas design is more of a kind of professional mindset having to do with problems and certain relationships between form giving and functionality.
00:27:07
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And then fine art, at least since Marcel Duchamp, has a much more philosophical definition, which has to do with
00:27:14
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you know, institutional or artistic selection and, if you like, bequeathing the status of art to an object that has either been found or made.
00:27:25
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So, you know, it's probably not that clarifying to juxtapose them to one another, or at least it's no more clarifying than, let's say, juxtaposing design to, I don't know, science or to dance or to architecture.
00:27:43
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You know, there's a lot of these categories floating around, and I think it's unfortunate that we allow ourselves to get so confused about art craft and design in relation to one another because it maybe, you know, overestimates the degree to which they are only defined in relation to one another.
00:27:59
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In fact, they're defined in a much more complicated field of other possibilities.
00:28:07
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Having said all that,
00:28:09
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I definitely think that craft has its own very significant role to play in American history and world history and in formations of culture.
00:28:19
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And that has to do as much with the figure of the artisan, him or herself, as it does the object.
00:28:26
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This is something I'm thinking a lot about for my next book, which is going to be a history of American craft.
Cultural Importance of Artisans and Craftsmanship
00:28:32
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And one thing I've been thinking through is
00:28:37
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the role that the artisan plays in society.
00:28:39
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And if you think about it, they're sort of the people in the middle.
00:28:44
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Like they're not the totally oppressed, unskilled working class, you know, laborers.
00:28:51
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But they're also not the people who own the means of production and they're not the aristocracy.
00:28:55
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Right.
00:28:56
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Kind of right in the middle of society.
00:28:58
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Right.
00:28:59
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And they also tend to be quite trusted by people around them because they're providing a service through the making of objects.
00:29:05
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You know, you think about a silversmith in the 18th century or a machine builder in the 19th century or somebody like Art Carpenter in the 20th century.
00:29:14
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Very different from one another.
00:29:15
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But in each case, they are, I suppose, respected for the skills that they have and for the things that they can make.
00:29:24
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And I think that's almost as important, those people's position in the culture.
00:29:30
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That's almost as important or more important than the objects that they generate is the fact that they are these linchpins of society.
00:29:40
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And to the extent that you lose your bedrock of craftsmanship in the culture, you're going to have problems, in my view.
00:29:50
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So that's one of the things I've been sort of mulling over recently.
00:29:54
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Can we talk about handcrafting versus mechanical production?
00:29:59
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And I want to put that in sort of in a bit of context because I think that it's, we sometimes confuse handcrafting with authorship.
00:30:11
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I know this very well in the world of antique silver, where if you, for example, buy a piece of silver by Paul Revere, you
00:30:23
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The implication to the uninitiated is that Paul Revere took a piece of silver and he hammered it out and turned it into a coffee pot, and now it's a Paul Revere coffee pot.
00:30:36
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In reality, Paul Revere was the head of a business, and the business involved a large number of
00:30:42
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uh, of workers.
00:30:45
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And they turned out a large number of pieces, many of which Paul Revere himself never touched, um, may not even have had anything to do with.
00:30:54
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And, um, you know, we can talk about that with, uh, with old master painters.
00:31:02
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Um, similarly, you know, how much did, uh, uh, an artist actually have to do with the production of a particular work?
00:31:10
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But then we also have this separation between works that are made by the hand of the craftsman or by the hand of the craftsman with a hammer or with a saw versus works that are made with the assistance of more elaborate machinery versus works that are made with the assistance of mass production lines.
Distributed Authorship in Crafting
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There's a wide spectrum of means of production.
00:31:41
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And we bundle them all together under an artist's name.
00:31:46
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So tell me, to make this more concrete, tell me about Art Carpenter's wishbone share.
00:31:53
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How was that actually physically made?
00:31:58
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So in the case of Art Carpenter, you actually have a pretty classic craft situation where you have one man doing art
00:32:07
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all the work he did take on apprentices to teach them, but I think they would have had very limited ability to contribute, to be honest.
00:32:16
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More showing them the ropes and sending them on their way.
00:32:19
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And he was kind of a proud, rugged individualist, so he really wanted to do things himself.
00:32:26
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But in the case of an 18th century silversmith like Revere, as you say, you have a situation that I would like to describe as distributed authorship.
00:32:36
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So I think what you don't want to do is say to yourself, oh, well, if this person didn't have their hands on it, then it's not their work.
00:32:43
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Because that obviously flies in the face of, well, almost all of art history to begin with.
00:32:50
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Just for starters.
00:32:51
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Before you even get into the question of design or architecture and the various ways that buildings and mass-produced objects are realized.
00:33:00
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So the way I like to think of it in terms of distributed authorship is that you are authoring the situation.
00:33:08
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In other words, you're creating a system in which the object is going to be made.
00:33:11
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And that would be just as true if you're creating an 18th century silversmith shop or a 19th century factory or even getting involved in contemporary art and its various fabrication procedures.
00:33:25
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And so there's a kind of naive way
00:33:28
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that a lot of people want to attach the mark of the hand or the touch of the hand with authorship.
00:33:35
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But actually, the best way to think of it is that you are engaging in an act of making that has a lot of contingencies and complexities to it.
00:33:46
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And by the way, it is worth pointing out that even Art Carpenter himself, who did have this very rigorously self-sufficient way of making his work,
00:33:56
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he, of course, would have been using a lot of tools, which themselves would have been made by other people.
00:34:01
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And this is where, you know, David Pye, the great theorist of craft and design, his distinction between the workmanship of risk and the workmanship of certainty is so useful, because what he says is that we shouldn't distinguish between making by hand and making by machine.
00:34:19
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We should distinguish between different kinds of tools.
00:34:21
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So the difference between
00:34:24
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chisel and a computer-guided rotary cutting tool is that one of them involves more workmanship of risk, in other words, less control of the result, and the other one has had a lot more certainty built into it as a more predetermined result.
00:34:42
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And that's a really clarifying thought because it helps you realize that what you're really talking about is different tooling systems that the person is engaging with.
00:34:52
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rather than an absolute distinction between hand and machine or an absolute distinction between authorship and non-authorship.
00:35:00
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I want to throw another dichotomy out there, this one being comfort versus style.
Balancing Comfort and Style
00:35:07
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And you said earlier that you like to sit in the wishbone chair to write.
00:35:13
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Is it a comfortable chair to sit in?
00:35:15
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Yeah.
00:35:17
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I think it's a comfortable chair to do things in.
00:35:20
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I wouldn't necessarily relax in it.
00:35:22
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Like, I don't think I would sit in it and read, which is an interesting distinction, maybe.
00:35:26
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Right.
00:35:28
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Do you think that Carpenter intended it that way?
00:35:30
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Was he trying – he wasn't trying to make a lounge chair, presumably.
00:35:35
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Right.
00:35:36
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Yeah, it's intended as a desk chair or a dining chair.
00:35:39
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So it's a chair to do things in.
00:35:42
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So it does have a –
00:35:45
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Okay.
00:35:46
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But it has a sort of intended function and it seems to serve that function fairly well.
00:35:53
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Yeah, yeah.
00:35:54
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It reminds me of this great, I don't know how true this is, but apocryphally there's a distinction in Appalachia between sitting chairs and visiting chairs.
00:36:03
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and a sitting chair is more comfortable than a visiting chair.
00:36:06
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So the idea is that you have a more formal seat that you give to people when they drop by, but the slight implication is that they're only there temporarily.
00:36:16
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A sitting chair is something you're going to actually really settle into and spend your days in, and they're just designed differently.
00:36:22
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So they're both comfortable for the role, but that involves a degree of social situatedness, psychology, and so on.
00:36:33
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Well, I hope you're sitting in a comfortable position right now, as I've been keeping you here for a little while now.
00:36:41
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What do you think?
00:36:41
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I mean, to sort of broaden that topic a little, these pieces seem to be made primarily as functional objects in contrast to pieces that you might see in certain museums that seem to have been made primarily with an aesthetic object in mind.
00:37:02
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Do you think there's a meaningful line to be drawn between furniture that's made primarily to sit in, for example, versus furniture that's made primarily to look at?
00:37:15
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Yeah, I think it's certainly a meaningful distinction.
00:37:17
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It's, of course, important to remember that that's partly in the mind of the maker and partly in the mind of the user.
00:37:25
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You know, I remember my first book, Thinking Through Craft, I talked about the fact that you could certainly unstretch a Mondrian painting and then upholster a chair with it if you wanted.
00:37:37
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Nothing would physically stop you from doing that.
00:37:40
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So I do think people tend to overestimate the extent to which the object itself is enforcing functionality versus pure visuality.
00:37:49
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But you certainly want to be aware of the intentions of the maker and
00:37:53
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And then there might be some qualities of an object that would, I suppose, indicate how it should be used or
Functionality vs. Aesthetic Appeal
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not used.
00:38:02
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Something design theorists often call affordances.
00:38:06
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So, for example, you could certainly take a Brancusi, lay it on that side and use it as a bench, but it would probably be a very poor bench.
00:38:14
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Yeah, I don't relish that thought.
00:38:17
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Right, so there certainly are some things about objects that sort of point you in the direction of how you should respond to them.
00:38:26
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But again, I think that it's a dance.
00:38:29
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Some things are inherent in the object, but a lot of it is what we bring to the object.
00:38:34
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And I don't tend myself to get very worked up about questions of functionality versus non-functionality.
00:38:39
Speaker
I think it's a little bit of a false lead.
00:38:41
Speaker
I just don't know how interesting it turns out to be because...
00:38:45
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What's really interesting is, given its function, what is it actually doing within that sphere of operation?
00:38:53
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That's really how I like to think of it.
00:38:56
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Well, I think that's a good note to close on.
00:38:59
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Have we missed anything about this chair that you'd like listeners to know?
00:39:04
Speaker
Oh, geez.
00:39:04
Speaker
What else can we say about it?
00:39:07
Speaker
I guess the only other thing I would say is that I think a lot about keeping in good condition.
Mindful Custodial Relationships with Objects
00:39:14
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And I think another thing, just getting back to the question of caring about your environment, is that if you really do have a concern for the objects in your life, then it might well be that you feel like you have a custodial relationship to them, not quite like a parent and child or an owner and a pet, but maybe something a little bit in that direction.
00:39:37
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And I actually think that's quite an important thing.
00:39:40
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to have in your life, that sense of concern and mindfulness.
00:39:46
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And again, I feel like it's something that grounds you in your time and your space in a way that's helpful.
00:39:52
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So that's another area where I think antiques, whether they're 50 years old or 100 or 500 years old, you know, they in a way encourage you to simply be more aware of your environment.
00:40:05
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And I do think that's a good thing.
00:40:08
Speaker
Well, Glenn Adamson, thank you so much.
00:40:10
Speaker
Hey, thanks, Ben.
00:40:11
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It's been great to be with you.
00:40:16
Speaker
Well, Michael, I've done the interview.
00:40:20
Speaker
You've listened to the interview.
00:40:22
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And you and Glenn did a fabulous job.
00:40:24
Speaker
It was a lot of fun to talk to him.
00:40:25
Speaker
I'm fascinated.
00:40:26
Speaker
He's a smart guy and he has a really interesting perspective on a lot of issues.
00:40:29
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You know, I loved what he said about developing a custodial relationship to objects in the environment.
00:40:38
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I mean, on several levels, that's a seductive concept to me.
00:40:42
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I was also thinking about...
00:40:44
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My lonely college years when I lived with a lot of IKEA furniture and had a kind of alienated existence.
00:40:51
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I didn't feel connected to my environment in the way that I wanted to.
00:40:56
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And one of the ways that I became connected is by, you know, really learning about the material world around me.
00:41:03
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So I just, what he said made so much sense in the context of my own thinking about my life.
00:41:08
Speaker
I don't know if you feel that way, but it was... I absolutely feel that way.
00:41:12
Speaker
And that's, you know, similarly to you, I think what drew me to this whole field of inquiry, this whole...
00:41:19
Speaker
world of antiques and art and decorative arts and so on is very similar to want to feel a connection and Glenn yes I asked him you know why why the chair matters yeah and his answer was well it matters to me it matters to me and you know it helps me to mediate the past and the present and I thought what he said about you know seeking to understand the past through the present and the present through the past and
00:41:43
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without allowing for either to kind of muddy the other was really beautiful.
00:41:49
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You know, I think that history has something to tell us about the present, but it also exists in its own realm, and we have to respect that, and vice versa.
00:41:58
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And this goes far beyond the context of the chair.
00:42:01
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I think that's a good note to end on.
00:42:03
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Any final thoughts?
00:42:04
Speaker
Well, I'm just so happy to be co-hosting with you, Ben, and I think this is going to be a great deal of fun.
00:42:11
Speaker
Thanks for listening.
00:42:12
Speaker
Just to remind you, we love getting your ratings and reviews on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you're listening to this.
00:42:18
Speaker
It helps get the word out.
00:42:19
Speaker
You can email me at podcast at themagazineantiques.com or find me on Instagram at Objective Interest.
00:42:25
Speaker
And Michael's fantastic Instagram account is sensibly at Michael Diaz Griffith.
00:42:30
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Our producer is Sammy Delati.
00:42:31
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Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
00:42:33
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Michael Diaz Griffith is my co-host and I'm your host, Ben Miller.