Raymond Williams, in *Culture*, wrote helpfully and insightfully of historical formations of ‘art’ production: bard, court official, aristocratic private patronage, church patronage, cultural marketplace, etc; atelier, guild, etc. So: who is an ‘artisan’ today? Williams xxxx - Culture
Is this a proper use of the historical category; or just Jamie Oliver foodie-marketing hype? Has patronage (and thus, private or institutional wealth, and elite status) always been a constitutive part of artisanal production? Is ‘artisan’ a different value from ‘craftsman’: the self-employed master (independent master, small businessman, petty-bourgeois property-owner) of a small workshop/atelier, as distinct from the apprentice-trained wage-worker within an industrialised division of labour?
Today in any medium-to-large urban or residential setting - if you have the disposable income and the wheels - there is a shop or stall or pop-up that sells ’artisan’ bread or cheese or charcuterie, there is ‘craft’ beer from a local brewer (and also from across continents, at eye-watering prices), there is the hipster’s custom-configured fixie; there is farm-gate, bring-your-own-container, organic milk from heritage herds . . . I refuse to entertain the £3 loaf but I admit to drinking the £5 pint.
As gaps between poor and rich and super-rich open wider there is increasing luxury spending, and the luxury of individualism and very affected mannerism in means of everyday subsistence, within circumscribed circuits of localised trade; or, for that matter, within self-service, self-pleasuring, hobby-making and petty-artisan or petty-artist, marginal production, sourced from global supply chains and retailed through local art-and-craft outlets to middle-class clienteles.
> I think of the huge self-regarding outburst of semi-amateur ‘art’ that parades itself each year in the Open Houses of the Brighton Festival - and dozens of other tourism-sector, local-economy-boosting marketplaces across the British cultural calendar.
# Craft as a sector of commodity ‘Craft’ has become a division of commodity production and commodity service and commodity leisure. Do we value the craft of the micro-brewer enough to pay his prices; or is it just a self-indulgence that sustains pretentious habits (with pretentious rationalisations) in well-heeled neighbourhoods? If we buy the artisan bread (or any other ‘slower’ food) are we sustaining a tradition and a capacity for quality and a quality of working life, or are we simply populating the market-segment of luxury consumption, percolated now a little further down the pecking order over the generations of consumer capitalism, from Church, to landed gentry, to nouveau-riche, to Chelsea-tractor-driving City Yuppie and yummy mummy and professional-managerial commuter?