There are a few locuses of drama in the online crafty world - mostly on Craftster, LJ, and the Etsy forums, I hear - but I stay blissfully away from them. There isn't much in what I do see that would qualify for LJ Drama or Fandom Wank, but here's an exception....
CRAFT's blog is normally all polite and nicey-nicey and enthusiastic. Therefore, it was a surprise to see this post when I looked at it today. If you don't want to click over... well, it takes more space to summarize than to cut and paste, but I'll summarize.
Basically, the New York Times' Sunday Styles Section had an article this weekend about Brooklyn's Renegade Craft Fair, called "Where the Craft Babes and DIY Dudes Are." The author, Melena Ryzik, pokes a bit of fun at hipster cliches in the article's opening, but not at anything else related to the show... just a joke that all Williamsburg hipsters these days drink Pabst Blue Ribbon, are graphic designers, and wear cowboy boots, and a lot of the guys have facial hair. The actual coverage of the show is respectful and informative.
Dale Dougherty, the publisher of CRAFT & MAKE, then writes the following, and Natalie Zee Drieu (who is ordinarily so sweet!) goes and posts it on the CRAFT blog, maybe under his instruction, I don't know:
In the Sunday New York Times, I read the article titled "Where the Crafts Babes and D.I.Y. Dudes Are." This Sunday Styles article, was about the Renegade Craft Fair in Brooklyn but the author sadly made a choice to let her snide opinions get in the way of covering the event. I was completely put off by her snotty, condescending tone. ("How many graphic designers does the world need?") If you cared about the craft world getting a fair shake, you could not read the article without getting angry at its author. So I wondered who was Melana Ryzik, the author of this piece? Today I googled her. I found her eponymous web site (melenaryzik.com) but Google warned that "the site may harm your computer." Her site had been hacked -- hacking a hack, I guess. What goes around comes around.
A repost of Dale's comment formed almost the entirety of Natalie's post. Then come the comments.
It's not that easy to post a comment to Craft's blog, so not many posts get comments. (I have a comment account, but I can't log into it or stay logged in to post something... it just doesn't work for me at all, seems to be a browser issue, dunno. I assume that other people have the same problem. The commenting window is scripted so that it "appears" and "disappears" based on whether or not you're using it - an excellent argument for relatively simple website programming, people.)
This post got FIVE comments. If it were MetaFilter that would be, like, 200. Not a single comment is supportive of the attack on the NYT piece. Several are actively critical, suggesting that the post was uncool and unprofessional.
None of the commenters really seemed to make the point that Ryzik's "snide" comments were totally about hipsters, and not about crafts at all, and any hipster knows that they're the same kinds of comments that hipsters make about hipsters while the comment-making hipsters are pretending not to be hipsters, if that makes any sense.* They're more along the lines of, "We ARE crafters and we DO care about the scene... and there IS a lot of repetition, the same products and motifs from different people, and the article wasn't disrespectful at all."
I think the issue is actually that alternative craft fairs & the styles they promote are becoming the "mainstream" in the world of hand-crafted goods that get media coverage. I think the other issue is that many, many hipsters are artists of some kind, or at least art-friendly wannabes. If the Venn diagram of "hipsters" and "young creative people who may have studied art or music or etc" were drawn, the circles would probably overlap to a large degree.
Admittedly, you can still go to Amish Country and find crafts based on goose silhouettes. Country crafts aren't suffering, they just don't hold primacy in craft stores anymore, particularly once you're in the burbs or a city. Much of the newer stuff coming out seems to be more design-oriented, not out of place in the hipster craft scene. (I approve of this shift, but it's worth noting that it IS a shift.)
For what it's worth, I took a few years to do half of a graphic design degree part-time, mostly foundational art classes. There were two reasons I let my design studies go, and one is that while I was the only aspiring designer in my classes when I started - most of the others wanted to be photographers or architects or illustrators - after two or three years there was a huge surge in design studies and suddenly all my classmates wanted to become graphic designers. I had a similar thought - related to myself, not my classmates - Does the world really need another graphic designer? I didn't feel like I was substantially talented in that department - I had a problem generating ideas - and I didn't feel like it was the only thing I could be happy doing, though I do care about design. So I changed my major to Art History.
THIS JUST IN! More commentary on the NYT article from Core77. The gist of this post is that, duh, of course trends are trends, even indie trends.
* Whenever I'm on Ohio State University's campus, or in one of the surrounding student hangouts, or - especially - at a concert, I tend to see at least a few hipster kids whose fashion sense and personal hygiene put me off. I'm like, "Comb your hair, shave, take a shower, wash that handbag once in a while!" But silently, because I'm not THAT rude.
Then my fiance and I were looking at Everybody Hurts, the recent book about emo as a subculture, and lo, there was a ME under "Indie Emo." I was all blushy until I looked under "Trustafarian Emo" and found all my fiance's favorite bands, haha. But seriously, I look like a 90s hipster, not a modern one....
haha! I have come to the conclusion that teh internets=drama.
So silly. It's too bad because there are so many great venues for finding, and showing your stuff.
Posted by: Life In Stills | 06/28/2007 at 09:45 AM