Reading: The Revival Of Handicraft

Art Workmanship
- reaction against mechanisation
- revert to handicraft

The effect of machinery vs handicraft on the arts

Made to Measure (something made specifically for you) vs mass-production (something made for the general market - the mythical average man).

Middle Ages - Production individualistic in method. Little DIVISION OF LABOUR

First medieval period - Slef employed workman using own tools.
Latter 16th cetury to 18th century - captialist, and the workman, and a division of labour
A change from man using tools (superior), to tending machines (subordinate)

Machines produce ugly thing (utilitarian).

Beauty not as an end in and of itself, but as an environment, a context for other life purposes or activities. Therefore important to have in your surroundings. Society cannot be happy without happy people. Squalid surroundings and wretched drudgery do not make for happiness.
Art in the service of some purpose makes it beautiful.

GREAT EPOCHS OF PRODUCTION
Civilisation being guided by or having a spiritual purpose determined/debated by the intellectual aristocracy.
Mass-production creating capitalists/rich manufacturers - material purpose - who supplant the aristocracy. Status aristocrats (born and bred) being challenged/replaced by wealth aristocrats (new money, rich people).
Basically mass-production changing the power structure of society.

Division of labour being fragmentary or anti-holistic (to the worker). Also the machine displacing workers, creating unemployment and leading to poverty.
But also mass-production making affordable to the poor what was once only affordable to the rich. Mass-production being an equalising or liberating force.

Karl Marx - Socialism "Capital".

THOUGHTS:
William Morris seems to be on the money pretty much and it is surprising how much of what he has to say is still relevant today, considering it was written over 100 years ago.
I think technology has come a long way, and not all mass-produced things are ugly any more. Or at least ugliness isn't an inherent quality of mass-production. There are some very beautiful mass produced things out there. Indeed some mass-production processes are more exacting and precise than any human could be. Microchips being a case in point.
His talk about the surroundings (i.e. environment) is still just as important now. Keeping beauty alive within the human footprint.