I can't understand maintaining a determined prejudice against
the material itself. Like any other material or technique, it is
value neutral.
Hi All;
Somebody, I think, has called for peace. I’m for war. War till it’s
over. So here goes. I hope someone has fun with this.
PMC’s difficult entry into acceptance. I’m flat-out cynical about
PMC. But I’m very clear on my prejudices. I feel you are
pretentious to call yourself an artist without an MFA or some equally
strenuous level of suffering in your history. I find it hard to take
you seriously when you call yourself a jeweler if you haven’t busted
your arse for a couple decades at the bench. I will turn on my heel
with a snort if you proclaim you are a metalsmith and you can’t do
everything from raising, casting, fabricating, and you better at
least have had some success at Mokume, granulation, and a little
blacksmithing as well. I’m a real snob is what I am. PMC? Well,
better knock my socks off or I’m going to figure you are a dabbler.
But all that aside, welcome to Orchid were diplomacy and good taste
prevail and we’ll try not to make you feel ill at ease no matter what
your skill level. Is everybody clear on my position here? Devil’s
advocate and provacatuer. So let’s look at what Beth brought up,
because I think she’s hit it on the head and I wrote this diatribe
before I read her post but it caught my eye.
Let’s look at the more subversive issue involved. Let’s take up the
socio-economic aspects. Why not get this over with by the cessation
of around-the-bush beating? What we are falling prey to is yet
another little way in which class warfare is evidenced these days.
I’m going to get grit in somebody’s eye, I know, but here’s my 2
cents worth of truth as I see it. Let me see if I can, once again,
be an equal opportunity offender.
The veterans of the trade have worked 40-plus hour a week jobs for
decades and they are lucky to make the wages of an auto mechanic.
They are tired of watching the bosses wife showing off the new pair
of silicone ones while they are driving around with bald tires on the
old Saturn. The art school grads are in debt up to their eyeballs
with student loans and they can’t get a teaching job because the
friggin colleges are going to bust tenure and run on adjunct and
interim faculty so no more cushy jobs if they haven’t just plain shut
down the entire art department. The craft fairs once promised an
alternative. Fun, travel, a good living, creativity. The trade
people wanted in, and they could do better with their well made gold
and gemstone creations than the silversoldering, bezel pushing hippie
types who went to art school. They understood that good jewelry was
hard work (thereby missing the point, I think). The art school types
hated them for their success, and were certain that they themselves
were the more creative ones, which was mostly true until they too
started imitating the heck out of each other and what’s more they
figured they were entitled since they were some of the ones who
started it all (which they weren’t, it was the
sandals-made-out-of-old-tires-real-hippies selling tie-dye).
Then along comes the beaders, and the wire twizzlers, and all the
rest of the amateurs, and they’re even working their way into the
galleries, the internet, jeez, they’re just spoiling everybody’s
dream of making a decent living doing something they like Along came
the merchandisers, selling overseas manufactured crap and really
spoiled it all for everybody, right? Maybe, but they were only part
of the problem. The greedy show promoters were selling two jewelry
booths to every one other craft space because jewelry was such a hit,
along with hand made glass which was also sooooo sexy (and pricey).
People who make more money with their booths won’t mind paying more
money for the space either.
For a while, the wholesale shows looked like the way to go, then
they too started to get too crowded, overpriced, under attended
because there were too many of them, under advertised, and there come
those damn beaders, twizzlers and ye-gods, dichroic glass crap
calling itself jewelry. Who let the dogs out? Dichrioc glass in
PMC? Shoot all the jurors right now! Retail shows, that’s where it
is now. Whoops, more of the same. It’s all just too many people
trying to get a piece of the shrinking pie. But is it really
shrinking, or just stinking? Probably a lot more people buying
jewelry, but a lot more buying cheap jewelry. Gersham’s Law at work
(google it).
So, PMC. Well, it allows somebody with a really minimum skill set
to make something pretty appealing (some would say it can really only
appeal to the unsophisticated). It requires little investment in
equipment. It’s real silver and gold. And . . . it’s multi-level
marketed in the same way the scrap-booking thing was. Take the
advanced courses, get certified, you get to teach classes and sell
the materials at a profit . .Perfect. Target the bored, middle-aged
housewife demographic. Any time now there will be more PMC
instructors than can fill their classes. M-L-M topout, or bottom
out, if you prefer. Besides, these PMC amateurs are going to under
price because their husbands have good jobs and they just do this for
fun and don’t really keep track of the money. Well, there goes the
neighborhood.
Well, listen up folks. I’m one of the most hard-core people here, a
bitter old veteran of both trade and fine art, and I waltz freely in
any and all camps, with my high-falutin’ MFA in metals and my 30
years real cahoney-busting slavery at the retailer’s back-room bench
and my roots in the wholesale sweat shops of Detroit. I can spin the
BS about deconstructionism and multi-cultural pluralism, drop names
like Jacques Derrida and Suzy Gablic while at the same time smooth
talk a diamond customer who comes in with a handful of Blue-nile
printouts and a smarmy Patagonia covered “I’m an educated consumer”
attitude stinking up the whole showroom. I can still size a dozen
rings an hour, no seams no pits, no problem. I can carve, cast, fab
and set. I can raise, braize, granulate and laminate . . . . Good
thing there’s only a very few of my kind and we’re all mostly
nut-jobs anyway or we’d bury all of you toot-sweet cause We Baaad.
We can make anything. We can make it real good. Who needs style? We
can do style-du-jour. Whaddayawant? . . . we’re ready. Of course
I’m suspect of PMC, but then, when I got out of art school and went
to work at the bench, the old timers laughed and called me a
“hobbyist” from the same sentiment. Now I’ve forgotten more about
jewelry than those hacks ever knew. So here’s what I say . . . .
Get over it. There’s somebody better than every one of us, always
was, and always will be. Very few of us are getting what we’re
worth, even what we need. And I don’t see too many people having a
lot of fun and if they are, somebody is bound to come along and spoil
it for them sooner or later. PMC can be badly done, and most of what
I’ve seen is lightweight even in it’s own right. If somebody is
having fun with it, well, somebody will put a stop to that. Most of
what I see in the trade rags is hackneyed crap. I want to throttle
some of those Spectrum award winners for their flat-out butt-ugly
creations and the kick the tar out of the intellectual art-types
hanging around SNAG for being such pretentious little snobs. I’ve
taught my dog to automatically urinate on the leg of anyone he sees
reading a copy of Art in America. None of what I’ve seen at the
wholesale craft shows is knocking me out. If I see anything I like,
I can’t get over my urge to make something I know is better. That’s
all because I’m jaded. Very good and very jaded. Nothing appeals to
me any more except very old jewelry. I’m like one of those guys
listening to Caruso on an old Victrola. My favorite metalsmiths and
jewelers are mostly dead. Sometimes I think I made a deal with the
devil so that I’d be the best of them all but the deal was that it
would never again be fun. So I say, if you want so pick on
somebody, let’s see you pick on the big bad guys who aren’t helping
the rest of us. Those would be:
Suppliers who squeeze us for our materials.
Service vendors who are greedy, incompetent, and arrogant.
Show promoters who overbook booths, under advertise, and let in the
riff-raff to sell crap.
Gallery owners who don’t pay their artists when they sell their
work.
Self proclaimed, self styled “Ar-teests” who are prima-donna
bone-heads who make their subs crazy with idiotic expectations
Employers who exploit their workers, by any means and for any
reason. Workers who automatically treat their employers as “the
enemy” from the get-go . . . not that I have that problem 
and anyone who generally expects a free ride.
and anyone else who is not “one of us” and me off.
. . . hmm. . . maybe I’d better re-think this…say, just exactly
who, in the above list, isn’t or hasn’t been, at one time or another
“one of us” or vise-versa?
We can always rip on Big Box stores and Mall chains. Easy targets,
and they don’t give a hoot. They aren’t in the jewelry business.
Not really. Jewelry, CD’s, pickles, what’s the difference to them. .
They took some of our market, but mostly they created their own
market for really cheap junky gold jewelry. They hurt the costume
jewelry business more than they did us.
Nothing like PMC threatens me, neither do internet e-tailers, or
technical wizards like Danny Brush, or a million other guys doing
what I do best, whatever that is. What threatens me is finally what
always has threatened me.
Change. Any and all change. Period. And that’s all that threatens
me. Well, that and loving anyone who I can’t be certain will outlive
me. Same thing, really. I’m with Jim Binnion on this. PMC,
interesting, overpriced (maybe that’s a good thing), not perticularly
interested in it myself. Go ahead, enjoy. I’ll let you know if I
get exited by it. Personally, I’m more interested in Japanese sword
hardware. That’s impressive. To each his own.
I’m hoping this might clear the cobwebs out for me and a few others
hereabouts. Meanwhile, I’m keeping my eye on these posts for
anything new and interesting. Might jog me out of jaded for a while.
David L. Huffman, working hard on yet another identity crisis,
revisited.
