[Jewelry making - Article 00368] - Re: [Orchid] Metalsmith's Exhibition in Print

[David L. Huffman]

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    Well, I guess this is the kind of thing I can't keep an opinion to
    myself on.  I felt a sense of vertigo looking at the stuff.  Not that
    it's so sophisticated or far out.  It's that it's so naive. 
    Commercial jewelry is usually about fashion and expensive materials,
    one or the other or both. Metalsmithing from the craft perspective
    has always tried to arrive at form via technique, at least for the
    last 40 years.  Whether it's successful or not can be observed on a
    case by case basis.  Now for the last two decades, some craft artists
    have been trying desperately to enhance their credibility, with whom
    I'm no longer sure, by embracing what they perceive as the "fine arts
    dialogue".  I think their attempts are reaching way beyond their
    intellectual powers.  This stuff isn't covering any ground that
    hasn't been gone over for the last half century, and it's making them
    look like amateurs, frankly.  What I suspect is that this stuff is
    mostly the latest wave of graduate work out of the academic metals
    programs.  And it doesn't speak well for the graduate committees, let
    alone, the instructors.  And what's worse, I know for a fact there is
    much better stuff out there.  Now Helen Shirk can be forgiven, I
    guess, for repeating herself for the last 15 years, she's earned
    that, but I'm waiting for her next sabbatical accomplishment.  I hope
    she will forgive me, but she was pretty stringent when she critiqued
    my work years ago (and I suspected then that it was in reaction to
    the fact that her students were so taken with it). 

    I could come up with a dozen names, off the top of my head, of
    people doing what I think is working within the best framework of
    metals form and methodology, but maybe they are now considered old
    guard, or maybe they've just got better things to do these days.  At
    this point I'm going to have to lay blame squarely on the editors. 
    Craft has much, much more power than this stuff. 

David L. Huffman

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