A machine might be able to make an objectively better thing, but that’s not what people are paying extra for. It’s the story about a real person applying their skills and effort to make it. Demand for that will likely never cease to exist. I bet it’ll just increase.
this is the turing test all over again: you can’t actually tell whether it’s handmade or made by a machine.
Last handmade item I purchased was made in front of me while I waited. A cool friendship bracelet of black, blue, & red. I’m really sad it’s lost in the Caribbean Sea.
It’s the story about a real person applying their skills and effort to make it. Demand for that will likely never cease to exist.
It all depends on the retail outlet. For “bigtime” art, yeah, the patrons chat with the artists, develop a connection… For more artsy-craftsy things, robots with calculated imperfections can replicate virtually any style that humans can produce. While an artist could paint 100 mugs by hand for an arts and crafts show, a successful artist might submit a program to an etsy style manufacturing center to produce 100,000 mugs in their “proven hot in todays’ markets” style for distribution to 1000 other resellers around the country to sell in their booths… Every one of the 100,000 mugs can be unique, but still in the recognizable style. And, buyers will be happy - until they figure out they’ve paid a premium for a mass produced “unique” item because they thought the old lady in the booth painted it herself.
Robots can have hands. Checkmate
When I was in art school a guest professor fussed (nicely) at me about this lol She said I clearly had skill but I was making everything too precise and people like art specifically because it looks handmade
Ever heard of lying?
Never, what is it?
It’s like when the stripper tells you that you are special and not creepy.
I like to play a fun game whenever visiting a place that sells “handmade” jewelry: Open up aliexpress and see how long it takes to find the original supplier…
“Handcrafted with love in Ohio.”
“shipping 2-3 weeks via yunexpress”
A friend sent me jewelry she found beautiful and almost every time I found the AliExpress listing. I don’t know if she got tired of it or if she finally understood that those things were just dropshipping.
Yes but that’s a different activity.
I think the key point here is. sadly the glut of the world right now, plus AI video etc… Point is if you try and buy something “handmade” from the internet, You’ll find a lot of mixed quality AI generated videos of people pretending to make the stuff, plus even if they didn’t AI generate the video, they may have just gotten or filmed one person making something similar to what they dropship once. (you can probably tell once you get it, but you’ll probably have to buy 5 counterfiets before you find a real one, unless you can physically walk to where they handmake it and see them make it.
unless you can physically walk to where they handmake it and see them make it.
Buy local.
That’s why I threw the caveat there “unless you can physically walk to where they handmake it”, but of course depends what you want and if you live anywhere near somewhere that does it.
If you really want something handmade, the best place for it isn’t online, but in outdoor market stalls
Etsy begs to differ.
Let’s say that I start making hand made spoons in clay, and they become so popular that I no longer can keep up with the demand. I hire 10 other clay makers (I dunno if this is a term, but I guess you get it) and they learn to make these spoons like I do.
That allows me to focus on increasing my catalogue of hand made clay objects and now I have 10 different items I can sell and the demand explodes, so now I have 50 people sitting making hand made clay forms, and then a machine is mass producing spoons and other items, but each item have 50 unique variants, initially designed by me, and then later 50 employees created a form for a machine to produce.
Is it hand made or machine made? Technically it’s machine made, but you’ll most likely not meet another with an identical one.
My apologies for this comment, I am extremely bored and in physical pain, so this happened… And it probably doesn’t make any sense to anyone but me.
The famous painter Rafael ran a studio full of apprentices - he was a painter the way Thomas Edison was an inventor… it’s virtually impossible today to be sure how much of a Rafael painting was done by Rafael himself, though some of his apprentices had styles distinct enough for todays’ analyists to point to which part of which canvases they worked on.
See also: Rodin bronzes.
It’s a valid comment and a concept that is fussed about everywhere in hand craft circles. I do woodworking and I use a CNC machine sometimes. Woodworkers without a CNC say that’s not woodworking but most who have one say it absolutely is woodworking, because you have to know what you need the wood to be, you have to know how to make the machine do it and you have to know what the limitations are, etc.
I think the concept you’re looking for is mass production or corporate owned production. To me, that’s what differentiates. If a person in their garage is making something using a machine, it’s a lot closer to someone using hand tools than a corporation buying or building machines to crank out things while paying others to operate the machines as cheaply as possible.
20 years ago I used then cutting-edge computer tech to make abstract art images for printing. The printing itself was somewhat of a craft, but ultimately once setup I could produce one, or ten, or thousands of each image if I had buyers for them. A local art gallery encouraged me, invited me to shows where they turned away about 80% of applicants, but the things didn’t sell themselves. The “best” outlet I found was a local restaurant which showed work of local artists on a rotating basis - I got in there for a week and sold one piece at a “profit” if you can call $100 for the effort of framing and hanging five pieces that cost $100 each to produce and bringing four them home when only one sold for $200 a profit.
At first I thought that of course it’s still hand made (I still do) when using a CNC machine (never heard of CNC machines before, so had to read an article about it), and I thought that it’s a completely different case than what I described, but is it?
What I described was inspired by a Danish entrepreneur who got famous for making these small hand made ceramic flagpoles, each hand made and each varied a lot… But she got some exposure in a Danish version of Dragons Den, and suddenly you could buy these ceramic flagpoles in every city. She no longer made the flagpoles herself, but she kept designing new products and taught her employees to make them like she did. They were at that point still hand made, but I think the definition gets a bit blurred, because when do something become mass produced?
If a human made it, then it’s handmade. Whether it’s actually made by who is claimed to have made it is a separate question.
I feel like only when you start involving things like 3D printing, laser cutting, or CNC milling does it enter that gray zone of whether it’s made by a human or a machine.
It is definitely difficult to draw a line in the sand between what is hand made or not.
I would say that 3D printed items is still “hand made” if the design was made by the creator.
You can, it’s called lack of quality control.
Well yes but they obviously can and do pretend to be handmade. Worse yet they make AI videos of a person making a product, that looks similar to, and probably significantly better than the dropshipped mass produced crap that they actually ship out.
People can be fooled. I remember my stepmom that sold “homemade quilts” she told customers they were made by a sewing circle in Tennessee. But truth was they came from Korea and most likely hand made in a sweat shop. So I expect a lot of “homemade products” to be faked. Like the fucking bookmarks that my wife order from Facebook and turn out to be bullshit made in China. Example of this bullshit:
I think there are things that cannot be automated, or at least not practically. For example, yesterday I saw handmade cat tree scratchers, which were some large branches screwed together.
But I think most of people do care much more about price then producing entity. Handmade products are premium, niche and artistic. But no-one would buy handmade bricks.
I think most of people do care much more about price then producing entity.
That all depends on where you are “on the curve.” Above $500 for a painting to hang on the wall? People want at least a good story to tell people about it, if not a personal connection to the artist. Below $50? Yeah, price is king.
