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do people know you can pay for custom pieces
Like, if a door knocker is that important to you, like an upper-middle class 19th century homeowner, you can just... pay 500$ or so for a nice one. I promise you that the 19th century homeowner paid much more for their's, adjusted for inflation.
Would it have been a custom piece in the 19th century though? They would have been in demand enough that it seems reasonable that they could have been hand-made in enough bulk to make them better priced than getting it made fully custom now.
it's not like there was an economy of scale to speak of, the ones in demand were likely the equivalent of $500 today. a door knocker is still purely a luxury item.
There kind of was
There would have been hundreds of people in the community who spent their lives doing metal working and casting
Nowadays for a vision job like that’s you’ll have to find one of a handful of specialists in your area.
Same with glass blowing and other artisanal work.
And good chance this knocker was made from a mold.
can't make a model like that with a solid mold. it's too far from a convex hull. you need to sand-cast it, cut off the pouring channels, then polish up the rough surfaces. then you need to heat up the knocker part in order to bend it into shape in the mouth. even if you cast multiple heads at once that's several days of highly skilled work per product. that doesn't come cheap.
You can simplify this and eliminate the forging by just casting more parts and assembling them. From looking at it I thought the teeth were removable and the fastener is hidden by the beard but other similar cast knockers seem to just make the ring out of two parts. https://www.chairish.com/product/14868315/antique-satyr-face-wram-horns-iron-door-knocker
Would it have been a custom piece now? Granted, I didn't find an exact match, but there are some damn similar ones on Aliexpress for like $40.
Generally, high-quality pieces would have been made by artisans (and thus usually custom), not factory-made. The high demand meant that the skills to make these pieces were more commonly pursued by woodworkers, thus making a larger labor pool (and so, cheaper labor), but the technology available and higher price of resources means that it would have required more expense in the form of materials and more man-hours to create the product.
Is "useless" a bad word now too?
it's gotta be rage bait at this point
Yes. In hustle culture useless is basically a slur. God forbid you can't be used for anything.
Why is the latest trend on the global information sharing network to nonsensically obfuscate the information that you want to share?
I ~~fucking~~ ~~hate~~ this ~~shit.~~
Careful! You don't want to offend the advertisers!
My take is that capitalism is the cause.
Hard to justify buying the nicer door knocker when you don't even own the house you are renting.
How about in neither willing not capable to pay a few k for a fucking door knob just for it to be custom made and beautiful.
This dip shit is comparing what would nowadays be Trumps or Musks door.
How about we create a world in which you didn't need a degree for beautiful things to be created?
I don't know why I find this so infuriating to me, it feels soo wrong on so many levels.
One reason Trump is hated by the New York elite is that when he put up Trump Tower he completely demolished the building that was already there. He repeatedly promised to preserve the iconic façade, but then claimed it was 'too expensive.'
Because it is.
That being said new art (on french, can't spell) was a time where regular people had that wealth. But brutalism etc. took it away.
Also the was little craft in mass produced ornaments.
Incentives are what killed it
"Show me your incentives and I'll tell you the outcomes"
Modernism and brutalism are both solving an economic problem. It's to make a building as "occupiable" as possible. It has no soul or defining features for someone to hate, so it appeals maximally to as many people as possible. It also saves a lot on labour, maintenance, and material costs when designing and constructing a new build.
Also, who the hell cares about the next tenant? They aren't paying the construction bill, and they're going to buy it at the price I want anyways because this building is modernist/brutalist and is as fungible as possible.
Modernism and brutalism are both solving an economic problem. It’s to make a building as “occupiable” as possible. It has no soul or defining features for someone to hate, so it appeals maximally to as many people as possible. It also saves a lot on labour, maintenance, and material costs when designing and constructing a new build.
"Tell me you don't know anything about modernism without telling me you don't know anything about modernism."
First of all, modernism was definitely not trying to blandly appeal to as many people possible. It's a reaction against traditional architecture and is therefore inherently contrarian. And especially so for brutalism (which is a subcategory of modernism rather than its own separate thing, BTW): you cannot tell me people don't hate brutalism, LOL!
Second, modernism is often more expensive than traditional styles. Many of the elements of traditional architecture became "traditional" for practical reasons: sloped roofs shed water even when they aren't perfectly constructed. Decorative moldings exist to cover up gaps and obscure corners that aren't quite square. When you get rid of that stuff, you make the building a lot harder and more expensive to construct because everything has to be perfect: your flat roof needs to be absolutely water-tight, your carpenters have to work to much tighter tolerances, you need a damn skilled plasterer to finish your drywall perfectly fair and smooth without using ceiling texture to hide the unevenness, etc.
Even if it wasn't called a degree as such, artisans had to study under masters for years to learn the craft.
But aren't people with art degrees the ones designing the new sterile, soulless things?
That's because the people signing their paltry checks demand it.
Then demand something else as a customer.
Not how any of that works, but good try?
It's exactly how that works
No, the dominant factor in the world is profitability. It doesn't matter what the demand for beautiful things is, the things that are the most profitable that most people will buy will dominate. Lowest common denominator type stuff.
Artful things cost more to produce than simple geometric shapes. So, in order for the artful things to have the same profitability as the simple things, they have to cost more money. Costing more means that less people will buy it, so it actually needs to cost even more to remain competitive. Bish bash bosh, beautiful becomes synonymous with wealth and then it needs to compete with the trendy expensive things that the wealthy buy. If this is how the world works, then you'd expect things like this to be common among the wealthy in times of it being a trend. Otherwise, you'd expect it to be niche or old.
(Looks out at the world) Yep, elaborate knockers are out of fashion, and all of the rest are niche or old. Interesting, that.
No that’s the industrial designer who only gets a budget to make it functional and mass producible.
We're censoring "useless" now?
Censoring causes engagement.
I would be shocked if simple door knockers weren't common side-by-side with the ornate door knockers throughout history. But being simpler and of a lower quality, they would neither be as notable nor endure until today.
Why are we censoring usernames
It is weird internet compulsion people have. "Oh no I better protect the identity of this person who posted a public comment on a public platform."
What about censoring useless?
Why are people censoring at all?!
Art naturally proliferates as people have more free time. Right now we’re all overworked and overstressed, so much less art happens.
we keep moving the craft of being human into that of being technology
I like the right one better.
Having an art degree does not make one an artist.
Not saying that art degrees are useless, just that they don't inherently result in any art being created.
They want the AI to create the left one, then blame artists for the right one.
The reason behind the change is industrialization. The right one is just a regular handle with wider appeal, the left one needs more specialized equipment and is only applicable to people wanting that style of handle, not a handle of function.
I hate that minimalist designs aren't acknowledged as artistic.
In my opinion, it is no different than the ai idiots who think all art needs to be hyperrealistic; That good art is hyperrealistic.
When you alnost can't have anything but 'minimalism' (not sure if most of the things that you can get count as minimalist and not just extremely utilitarian) it kind of destroys the feeling.
(not sure if most of the things that you can get count as minimalist and not just extremely utilitarian)
Definitely utilitarian. Stuff that's actually minimalist requires thoughtful design and precision construction and is therefore actually pretty fucking expensive.
There's a beauty in simplicity
One kid with an art degree, another on the way. Art is life.
When we are free to pursue what our heart desires, more art happens.
Have won in cost, and have lost in cost.
No, art is better these days.
Like for hundreds of years shit like this was peak
"We can only draw 2D from the side", like a third grader. People had to invent persepctive some thousand years later. Come on, just draw what you see, how hard can it be? Or did everybody just walk like Mario all the time and that is just what artists were seeing? I mean, Egypt is like a 2D country along the Nile, so maybe they just didn't know any better. Being ancient Egyptian meant being constantly trapped in a scroll platformer.
SMH.
Hundreds!
That knocker is almost perfect
There just needs to be an even tinnier knocker in the tiny demon’s mouth