This is a sort of follow up to Owen Lowe's excellent thread about our history and whether I'm right or wrong, please add your thoughts. Woodturning is a great and growing hobby and/or small business that many seem to consider a second rate art form. Why? Probably the percentage of our 'good enough' work to that highly acclaimed by a discriminating public is the same as that for most other art/crafts. There are an awful lot of happy hobby painters who are failed artists. Are we too inbred? Isn't the great majority of our art work done to please our peers? Are our peers discriminating critics or just an ordinary support group? A true critique with no dissembling praise of a picayune turning nowadays is hard to find. Are the really successful artists in other mediums nice guys like our leaders who share their knowledge and works and involve themselves with any and every level of woodturning? Are our organizations, net forums, websites, magazines, instant galleries and symposiums mostly geared toward hobbyists who dabble in the difficult professions of good craft and fine art?
For me this state of affairs is fine and entirely satisfactory, but then perhaps I shouldn't deplore the current state of the public's acceptance of turned wood. I wonder if the efforts we make and objects we turn to please each other and the objects that hold their own with other media might not be mutually exclusive.
Just a thought. What's your take?
Turn to Safety, Arch Fortiter