An Alt Cult Market Evolves, Corporate Culture Crashes, and the Customer is Allways Out of Her Mind
Reverberations as the myth of the centralized solution collapses
Originally Published in Woodworkers of the World Unite!!! on Medium. 4/17/2022 8:15 pm
Allow me to introduce myself.
I was raised in an unusual background. It takes a lifetime to realize how unusual it was, as, from an immersed perspective, it is the norm. The understanding that my background is out of the ordinary in the context of the larger world is unfolding continuously. I had to lose what we had to see it, or at least to lose a central part of it, the production facility, which for years I have been visualizing as manifesting anew as a network of many small independently owned studios.
My visualization of a studio network came in the form of a practical solution to an existing problem. The production of our entire line had landed on our small basement studio with its hewn rock walls that made it resemble a caveman’s working studio, very apropos for one of mankind’s most ancient technologies. I loved it but the line had grown too large for such a small space and so by the time I recycled the production, I forgot the simple little tricks that simplify the casting of a piece.
And so I thought, we need a variety of small studios! But how will I find the people who will love this as much as I do? The studios must be independently owned by the crafters. People are much more engaged when they are owners.
It didn’t occur to me, then, that I was engaging in political dialogue about the ownership of the means of production. I can see that clearly now.
For most of my life, I existed in a cultural stream of small entrepreneurs, oblivious to the hum of the distant corporate culture that was busy merging public resources with private special interests. The oligarchical character of public-private relationships was downplayed by crafting popular rhetoric into idealized visions of large corporate culture made up of innovative teams working creatively together to build a better world.
It came to be that the word “business” meant large corporate business as the world of small entrepreneurs was being phased out of public perception. The economic development leaders wanted to “attract and retain” businesses, but only if they fit the new definition of what constitutes a business- large corporations. The workers were constituents of workforces employed by large corporations. The working class entrepreneur was not part of the public-private state and so did not exist.
It was possible to keep that picture of perfect harmony intact when the media was controlled by the few but as social media grew other voices found venues, and the common conversation moved from the chat of Facebook to content provider platforms that casually formalize chat into ideas.
Then Covid appeared and moved the workforces from corporate headquarters into their homes and the rest of the world grew more similar to the alternate cultural experience that is my own, a business in a home.
Transformational changes brought a new narrative to the fore, one derived from the workers rather than corporate leadership. The critical mass that was speaking out really didn’t like corporate culture, they hated it.
Meanwhile, I was coming out of my cacoon and experiencing corporate culture in its public form, the corporate state, and its subsidiaries, the corporate municipality, that operates as if all of the inhabitants of the town are its obedient underlings. The government no longer existed to serve the people, the people are the perceived instrumentalities of government and the workforces, the trading pawns in deals struck by the government with private partners.
So what makes my background so different besides being a business in a home? My family created a line of ceramic slip-cast designs that were identified as art by the public as soon as they entered the marketplace, which in those days was just a two-hundred-year-old barn in a grassy field on the side of the road on Southport Island Maine, and retail shops that my parents located on a sales trip across the country. Later Andersen Design became one of the first companies to participate in the first New York City Gift Market, which was then located in a hotel near Columbus Circle, and the Andersen Sandpiper became one of the top-selling items in the Smithsonian Catalog for thirty years or so.
My family used slip-cast production but comparatively, it was a very small production, a niche market rather than a mass-market, but one that reached around the world selling in department stores in Japan and Denmark, and the USA, as well as small stores and individual collectors everywhere. Our work sold in museum stores but there was no effort to pursue art world recognition, simply because there was no time for that. It was a very complex business, and a rewarding one. Market research for developing a new design was a special request from our customers, other than that pure individualistic artistic inspiration had to make due.
One day, when the internet was young, I sent an email to all of our customers but I accidentally sent it so that all the customers could see the entire mailing list, and so I sent another email to apologize for doing so.
I received a response that said, ”No problem, Andersen collectors are like a cult, I trust everyone on the list”.
That is about the size of it. Our popularity is not necessarily known outside of our popularity and our field, but in over six and a half decades we grew a sizable inventory of slip-cast designs and original glazes and decorating colors and alongside that a sizable base of collectors who passed their collections down from one generation to the next. I do not know the breadth of it.
Throughout our history, very few items were ever discontinued because the market demand never ceased. Products that were discontinued were done so for technical reasons, such as the Blueberry glaze:
The Blueberry glaze was discontinued because the blue color floated around the kiln during firing and landed on other pieces, making it too problematic.
The first wildlife sculpture ever created, the floating gull, retained its popularity throughout the decades and we would still be making and selling it today if we still had a production:
The Andersen market still exists and is relatively obscure to the mass marketplace while the continuing market appeal of Andersen Design is reflected in the rising prices that Andersen gets in secondary markets, which are generally higher by twice or thrice than our last retail selling price point before we lost our production facility.
The work that Andersen Design produced over the years, from one-of-a-kind pieces to production work was sold without ever being recorded but now individual items are being recorded to be sold in the secondary market, creating a record of the variety of individualistic expressions that manifested within the Andersen Design production process. It was a historically unique way of doing mass production, not your usual factory.
And so it was that the Screech Owl caught my attention. There are some online photographers that do excellent work and such was the case in a series of images that I came across of the Screech Owl, decorated in the prototype pattern, and yet each one is so different from the other. in part due to the hand of the individual artisan and in part due to variation caused in the kiln firing. Unlike most productions, Andersen’s Design’s original body and glazes were designed to be interactive with the kiln environment. Individuality is built into the Andersen Design production process, by philosophical design, and that philosophy is one whose moment has returned in the newly rising call of the will to live life on our own terms.
With apartments and communities designed as repetitive grids and the mechanical contours of 3D printing, one way that people can express their own individuality is through the objects of art and living. The more automated the world becomes, the greater the attraction of the natural touch of the living hand.
Recently I read an article that claims AI can make art better than humans advising anyone making their living in graphic design to plan for a new career. That was one opinion but the examples illustrating the article are not convincing, looking like they were created by soulless robots.
The author went on to say:
The result? There will simply be no place for human artists, aside from maybe ‘artisan’ markets that are treated the same way we treat antiques today.
And how is that? He doesn’t say and didn’t seem to see the significance in artisan and antique markets surviving on their own terms.
So with that in mind, I came across a vintage Screech Owl on eBay. The pictures were terrible, displaying the owl from strange angles, not even showing the owl sitting in a normal position gazing at the beholder.
The owl was not receiving much attention and so I decided to bid on it. I noticed that the count-down clock ended the auction an hour earlier than the posted end time, but I had seen that same occurrence a week before and the auction had ended with the count-down clock.
I waited until the last twenty seconds to put on a proxy bid at the highest amount I could afford to pay. Proxy bids go up automatically but only to a dollar above the next highest bid. As soon as I did so the countdown recorded my winning bid as a dollar above the previous bid and the auction was over.
But something out of the ordinary happened.
The count-down clock restarted the auction with a new hour in red numbers. Another bidder bid up the price to twice what it had been before they gave up since my proxy bid outran them. I won the owl a second time at double the price the first time the auction ended.
I paid the higher price and I contacted eBay support. My phone needed charging so I used live chat. I was not asked any questions and told my complaint would be reported to tech. I asked for a time span or a way to contact tech directly and received neither. I felt no confidence that I would ever hear from tech.
Next, I tried Community Forum. I was told that no one believed me and that I must be mistaken for what I saw. They pointed to the recorded ending time as proof that there had never been a first ending time. I pointed to the unusual sixteen-dollar increment gap in the dollar value of the bidding that occurred exactly when I saw the auction end and then restart. All other increments were between one and five dollars. They brushed it off. It was another waste of time. There was no way to contact tech directly, who might be able to determine the truth of what I had seen. The community was very offensive in the way that social media often is.
While it has become increasingly difficult to have direct contact with customer service, many large online platforms are using community forums these days. It seems like a device to reduce corporate costs.
So the upshot is if you are bidding on eBay and notice that the count down clock calls the end of the auction earlier than the posted ending, make sure to take a screenshot when you place your bid. Perhaps then someone at eBay will believe you and put you through to tech, but then again maybe not. Perhaps you will be held under suspicion of photoshopping the screenshot, using the protocol assumption, that the customer is always out of her mind.
Since I have shown the first and third wildlife sculptures created by Andersen Design, it calls for ending this post with an image of the second wildlife sculpture, the Wallfish: