A&E
Clinton Fine Arts and Crafts Festival both over- and underwhelms
By Alex Witonsky ’17
November 10, 2016
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The Clinton Fine Arts and Crafts Festival, held both days last weekend in the gymnasium, faculty break room and hallways of Clinton High School, was utterly nightmarish when viewed from a certain angle. Well. From multiple angles, and all of them sober.
According to FestivalNet, a sort of online guidebook for festivals in the States and Canada, there were some 75 exhibitors displaying their wares. Yet, there could have been twice that number for all I knew. Of the
homemade goods and gifts peddled by the elderly merchants, there was nothing if not a bumper crop: delicate-looking aprons of faux-gilt, wooden picture frames, scarves, cotton candy made in blue and pink tubs, holiday-inflected ornaments, towels and painted wood -carvings, soap from lye, soap from goat’s milk, gratis maple syrup like wet amber in bendy plastic cups, topaz necklaces and purity rings, afghans overgrown with daisies and, providing token anti-establishment appeal under a canopy tent in the corner of the gymnasium, tie-dye shirts stiff on hangers and curled over clothing racks.
But as the “Fine Arts and Crafts Festival,” the first half of the name was somewhat of a misnomer. First, though finely made, most of what was sold under the roof of Clinton High School could not really be considered art, in the approximate sense that art is made to be looked at and not to be put to practical use. Next, those pieces that escaped the latter specification–aquarelles of local bars, grey and green Adirondacks stunned by local cameras, painted postcards of nature–had their fineness evaporated by dint of their tacky commercial and local bent.
This is not to say that shop-talking the Doggy-Biscuit Man about the burn-transfer-units of our respective wood-heated stoves wasn’t highly enjoyable, but I doubt whether anyone within a sizeable blast radius of Clinton High would elect to frame his dog biscuits over feeding them to a fattened pug. At least this is the sense I get when I brush shoulders with the folks who attend art history classes, rate poetry on e-boards and major in art. Similarly, Jane Watson Irwin Professor of Literature and Literature and Creative Writing Chair, Margaret Thickstun, her bag bulging with so-called bath bombs and an expert in appreciating and critiquing fine things for a living, seemed naught but eager to dissolve her pillage in the tub.
Clinton’s “Fine Arts and Crafts Festival,” under a more appropriate name, in a more egalitarian economy where corporate excess and microscopic price points haven’t obviated the role of home-production, making the elderly craftspeople seem like poor, depressed competitors to youthful college grads, may be rewritten as the simple “Home Marketplace.” Because that’s exactly what this festival and similar festivals are: carnivalesque and underground reincarnations of the American craft economy.
The American craft economy, which includes businesses engaged in the design, creation, distribution and sales of products, is valued between $10-19 billion, according to the Craft Organization Development Association. Although this amount is far from lilliputian, and more than enough to incentivize artisans to take to the festival-circuit during their weekends off, it pales when we consider Apple made approximately the same amount of money in only its first quarter of 2015. And while I do not know much more than what a cursory Google search may reveal to me, I think I am justified in asserting the commonplace that major corporations and their offspring commercial centres (see New Hartford) have if not outright axed the small businesses of mom and pop, then have radically modified the modalities of their economic output–craftspeople included.
In fact, American craftspeople weren’t always consigned to the role of weird, itinerant merchants in high school gymnasiums, though capitalism and the threat of industrial production has long forced those engaged in the production of handiworks to seek representation in numbers. To wit, the Society of Arts and Crafts was founded in Boston in 1897 as part of a wave of similar movements meant to restore the standards of design which had been debased by mechanization. In the same year, Chicago’s Arts and Crafts Society was launched out of the Hull House, a famous nexus for social reform and progressive feminist politics.
Notwithstanding ye olde craft industry’s affiliation with the socialist politics of yore, the festival such as the one in Clinton last weekend was a beast of a different nature. As my Acerbic Correspondent pointed out, regardless of their organic ingredients and chemical-free creation, pretty much all of the Festival’s pieces were repetitive iconographies of the suburban nuclear family. A fridge magnet: “I don’t use Google, I just ask my wife, she knows everything.” So here we see a yellow road of illusory choice, bifurcated thus: a Fortunoff or Walmart of individuality, or a conscious election to band with the Waldensians standing outside the Walmart and Amazon conglomerates. At the end of the path is a home; in it, a family, surrounded by their goods.