Amateur Craft

Amateur Craft

Author: Stephen Knott

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-08-27

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 147257737X

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Amateur Craft provides an illuminating and historically-grounded account of amateur craft in the modern era, from 19th century Sunday painters and amateur carpenters to present day railway modellers and yarnbombers. Stephen Knott's fascinating study explores the curious and unexpected attributes of things made outside standardised models of mass production, arguing that amateur craft practice is 'differential' – a temporary moment of control over work that both departs from and informs our productive engagement with the world. Knott's discussion of the theoretical aspects of amateur craft practice is substantiated by historical case studies that cluster around the period 1850–1950. Looking back to the emergence of the modern amateur, he makes reference to contemporary art and design practice that harnesses or exploits amateur conditions of making. From Andy Warhol to Simon Starling, such artistic interest elucidates the mercurial qualities of amateur craft. Invaluable for students and researchers in art and design, contemporary craft, material culture and social history, Amateur Craft counters both the marginalisation and the glorification of amateur craft practice. It is richly illustrated with 41 images, 14 in colour, including 19th century ephemera and works of contemporary art.


The Organization of Craft Work

The Organization of Craft Work

Author: Emma Bell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-08-06

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1351795295

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This edited book focuses on the organization and meaning of craft work in contemporary society. It considers the relationship between craft and place and how this enables the construction of a meaningful relationship with objects of production and consumption. The book explores the significance of raw materials, the relationship between the body, the crafted object and the mind, and the importance of skill, knowledge and learning in the making process. Through this, it raises important questions about the role of craft in facing future challenges by challenging the logic of globalized production and consumption. The Organization of Craft Work encompasses international analyses from the United States, France, Italy, Australia, Canada, the UK and Japan involving a diverse range of sectors, including brewing, food and wine production, clothing and shoe making, and perfumery. The book will be of interest to students and academic researchers in organization studies, marketing and consumer behaviour, business ethics, entrepreneurship, sociology of work, human resource management, cultural studies, geography, and fashion and design. In addition, the book will be of interest to practitioners and organizations with an interest in the development and promotion of craft work.


Amateur Craft

Amateur Craft

Author: Stephen D. Knott

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 9781474245111

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The Craft of Professional Writing, Second Edition

The Craft of Professional Writing, Second Edition

Author: Michael S. Malone

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2024-07-16

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1839992115

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The Craft of Professional Writing, 2nd edition is the most complete manual ever written for every form of professional (and professional quality) writing. Its chapters range from toasts and captions to every form of journalism to novel writing, book authorship and screenplays. The book offers techniques for the writing of each form, sample templates, and the advice on navigating a career in each writing field, including public relations and commercial writing, journalism in all media and self-employment as a freelancer. It also offers sections on the tools of writing, including pacing, editing, pitching, invoicing and managing the highs and lows of the different writing careers.


Novel Craft

Novel Craft

Author: Talia Schaffer

Publisher: OUP USA

Published: 2011-09-23

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0195398041

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Domestic handicraft was an extraordinarily popular leisure activity in Victorian Britain, especially amongst middle-class women. Craftswomen pasted shells onto boxes, stitched fish scales onto silk, scorched patterns into wood, cast flower petals out of wax, and made needlework portraits of the royal spaniels. Yet despite its ubiquity, little has been written about this curious hobby. Providing a much-needed history of this under-studied phenomenon, Talia Schaffer demonstrates the importance of domestic handicraft in Victorian literature and culture.Novel Craft presents what Schaffer terms the "craft paradigm" -- a set of beliefs about representation, production, consumption, value, and beauty that were crucial to mid-Victorian thought. She uncovers how handicrafts expressed anxieties about modernity and offered an alternative to the conventional financial, political, and aesthetic ideas of the era. Novel Craft reveals how this mindset evolves in four major Victorian novels: Gaskell's Cranford, Yonge's The Daisy Chain, Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, and Oliphant's Phoebe Junior. Each chapter centers on a scene of craft production that expresses the novel's ideals and also interrogates the novel itself as a form of craft, and each chapter highlights an influential craft genre: paper crafts, pressed flowers, knitting, and hair jewelry. The book closes with a coda on the current resurgent crafts movement of Etsy.com as a fresh version of a Victorian sensibility.Featuring illustrations from two centuries of domestic handicraft, Schaffer deftly combines cultural history and literary analyses to create a revealing portrait of a neglected part of nineteenth-century life and highlights its continuing relevance in today's world of Martha Stewart, women's magazine crafts, and a rapidly expanding alt craft culture.


Amateur Craft as a Differential Practice

Amateur Craft as a Differential Practice

Author: Stephen Knott

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

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This doctoral dissertation provides a theoretical examination of amateur craft as a differential practice. Concepts drawn from an inter-disciplinary source base are used to define, characterise and elucidate features of amateur craft practice that have long been presumed superfluous and opposite to valorised 'professional' practice. I investigate the attraction, motivation and complexities that lie behind this widespread, yet largely understudied, phenomenon of modern culture. Studies of everyday life, social history, aesthetics, material culture, art criticism and craft theory help conceptualise the position of the amateur, and case studies from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - including the paint-by-number mania in 1950s USA, suburban chicken keeping, and amateur railway modelling - serve to substantiate the theoretical claims made. The thesis is not comprehensive in its coverage of either a specific craft medium or a particular chronology or geography. Instead the thesis is divided into three thematic chapters: amateur surface intervention, amateur space, and amateur time. These chapters reveal some of the unexpected consequences of subjecting amateur practice to serious study. The examples demonstrate how amateur craft practice is differential within capitalism,dependant on its structures while simultaneously stretching, refracting, and quietly subverting them. As a reprieve or a supplement to an individual's primary occupation, the constrained freedom of amateur craft practice fulfils an essential role within modern life, providing a temporary moment of autonomous control over labour-power in which the world can be shaped anew.


Art and its Responses to Changes in Society

Art and its Responses to Changes in Society

Author: Martin Germ

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2016-08-17

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1443898074

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Art and its Responses to Changes in Society brings together studies of young researchers dealing with the topics of decline, transformation, and rebirth from various points of view, characteristic of several different fields of the humanities and social sciences, in order to yield new insights into the analyzed subjects. The topics discussed here are diverse: on the one hand, several chapters deal with the metamorphosis of particular pictorial or architectural motifs and concepts, while on the other, studies are included that are dedicated to the analysis of the opera of individual artists, to various periods in architecture and landscape architecture, and to national and state commissions in art, as well as representations of WW2 atrocities in Yugoslavia and attempts to artistically reaffirm Christian symbolism after the end of socialism. As such, the book entails diverse scientific perceptions of art and society, from antiquity to modernity, from architecture to moving picture, from the USA to Yugoslavia, and from research on an object to observations on a concept.