Craft vs Design

"One axiom has it that the machine is the predestined enemy of art. The hour has finally come to discredit such ready-made ideas. The machine can propagate beautiful designs, intelligently thought-out and logically conditioned to facilitate multiplication. It will become an important factor in raising the level of public taste. Through the machine, a unique concept can, when sufficiently inspired, popularise endlessly the joy of pure form, while preventing the distribution of a multitude of inept creations whose sole claim to being works of art stems from the presumable difficulty or skill involved in making them by hand." Siegfried Bing, 1895

Definition of axiom: "a statement or proposition which is regarded as being established, accepted, or self-evidently true." 

I'm not sure exactly if money can be counted as art, but when I read this quote I thought of how money is mass produced and made so that no one should be able to fake it, but it does happen more often than you think about 300 in one million for Pound sterling are counterfeited. 

I knew that the Royal Mint produced England's coins but I wasn't quite sure who printed the notes we use, I found out that they are produced using a printing process by the Bank of England and seven retail banks. 

- a retail bank is a bank who deals directly with the consumers rather than corporations or other banks.

I don't know exactly how money is made, but what I do know is that machines are heavily involved in the process, using printing plates and special ink and paper. But they still need people to run them, design them, fix them when they break down, etc. So it is a kind of two way street, people use machines to make art but the machines need people to make them.

The most obvious ways I can think of people using machines for art is; artists using software on a computer such as; Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop or on a simpler level Paint. They may not be a machine on their own but they make up part of the machines operation, so I think that it would still count. You can create some really interesting images using Photoshop. I found some pieces by 'An Artist' particularly interesting. I'm not sure if it is a man or  oman but some of their work reminded me of M.C. Escher's work especially this piece of the paintings within a painting which reminds me of Escher's hands drawings each other.

When Bing wrote this he wouldn't have been surrounded my machines like we are today, so in today's society art from machines is more readily accepted, by 1895 there were a lot of inventions but only a few that could be classed as a way of producing art including; photography, sewing machines, comic books, cinematograph (moving images). This link gives a list of Victorian era inventions; http://resources.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/homework/victorians/inventiotimeline.html, which gives you an insight into what machines Bing could have been referring to.

I looked into what would be considered public taste in 1895 and found this article on the instigation of public taste; http://archive.catholicherald.co.uk/article/12th-july-2002/14/the-artists-who-instigated-a-revolution-in-public-, but I can't find any actual information on 'public taste' of that era. So I think the next best thing would be to look at artworks from that time or what would have been considered the height of fashion, and then compare it to the modern day public taste and see how it has changed or in fact if it has changed at all, because despite 129 years passing, technology being developed and fashions changing drastically, every ten years it seems; us in our modern day are re-adopting past fashions and pieces of artwork that are hundreds of years old and more valuable than some people's houses. This is obviously a change because when the paintings were first created they may not have sold well or would have only sold for a small sum of money, but as time has gone on, like wine, they have gotten better with time - and more valuable. 

Bing says that "It will become an important factor in raising the level of public taste," but I'm not sure if that is something that you can determine, I think it changed the way people express public taste but I don't think you can say it raised the level of public taste. I think like most things it has just been adapted over the years and as with most things is mainly influenced by the 'elite' - eg. celebrities. 

But no matter how much machines can be made to use art, there will always be people there behind the machine, operating it, designing and making it, fixing it, inputting data etc. And as always there will be a vast amount of people producing art without machines and I'd like to think that that will never change.