How artisans won the market from corporates
When I lived in Washington, D.C., in my early twenties and faced the inevitable D.C. question, “What do you do?” I would answer truthfully that I was a barista. The next question was equally predictable: “What do you really want to do?” Never mind that I’d turned down a job at a well-regarded think tank to work in a coffee shop. The assumption was that as a young, educated person in the city, I should obviously have aspirations higher than making coffee.
This was the early 2000s, and at that time, you could count on one hand the number of places in D.C. contributing to what became known as the “third wave” of coffee in America, the one that succeeded Starbucks by bringing hip indie shops serving coffee and espresso with a higher level of care and attention to the American cityscape. I worked in one of these shops not because I lacked better options but because mastering a craft was far more satisfying than working in an office. I soon decamped to Portland, Oregon, which beckoned as a paradise of endless coffeehouses, microbreweries, and farm-to-table restaurants.
A decade later, this kind of crafty commerce had also saturated DC. And it isn’t just the big coastal cities; it’s also taking hold in suburbs and towns in the rest of the country too. The story of how so many neighborhoods and businesses throughout the United States have come to resemble those in Portland, Berkeley, and Brooklyn is the subject of anthropologist Grant McCracken’s new book Return of the Artisan: How America Went from Industrial to Handmade.
McCracken begins his tour of the artisanal revolution with two brief chapters on its predecessors, the industrial era of the 1950s with its delight in material progress and gobsmacking consumption of processed food, sugar, soda, alcohol, and tobacco, and then the countercultural hippies of the 1960s with their drugs, crafts, tofu, granola, and grubby organic markets. The hippie movement faded but hippie food won, laying the foundation for a more durable artisan culture to build on.
“Hippies renounced the world, only to discover that the world was quite happy to move on without them,” writes McCracken. Taking their place was the artisan, a figure more amenable to commerce. McCracken’s artisans “are okay with property, okay with capitalism, okay with technology. Artisans want to transform capitalism, to scale it down, make it less transactional and more social, less about economic wealth and more about communities flourishing.” Three pioneers he profiles are Stewart Brand uniting technological progress and environmentalism with his Whole Earth Catalog, Mark Frauenfelder promoting a fun do-it-yourself maker ethos, and, most notably, Alice Waters kicking off a revolution in food at Chez Panisse.
The diffusion of artisanship through a series of waves — restaurants, craft beer, coffee, mixology, Whole Foods, farmers markets, and Etsy, to name a few — is by now a familiar story. Heck, it’s inescapable. McCracken’s purpose is to dig deeper, making a case that artisanship is not just a fashion or trend, but a remarkably successful and settled part of American culture. This entails a new prestige for the artisan. “In the old days a visit from Chef said, Look, everyone, the chef knows me,” McCracken observes. That status relationship has reversed. “Nowadays it says, Look, everyone, I know the chef.”
There’s no illusion here that artisanship is replacing the industrial world. Artisans might make a living crafting wood and leather iPad cases, but they’re dependent on Apple to make the iPads. Procter & Gamble and Nestle aren’t going away. The change is in relative standing. Artisanship now offers a level of prestige that makes formerly aspirational corporate jobs seem kind of boring. Even when big brands ridiculously attempt to co-opt the language and aesthetic — what’s so “artisanal” about frozen pizza? — it’s a sign that artisanship commands cultural currency.
McCracken has high hopes for this movement to make a more humane economy. He’s surely correct that it helps make better communities. In contrast to the tit-for-tat market exchange of the corporate supermarket, artisans are inclined to do things for the intrinsic value of doing them, thinking about what they contribute externally, and intending to make money but keeping less careful track. One challenge for artisans is persuading consumers that doing business more cheaply is a “false economy,” one that saves money but undermines the kind of community they want to live in.
McCracken is less persuasive when it comes to the potential for artisan economies to solve the problem of providing meaningful, remunerative work in the economy writ large. Artisans, he concedes, are perpetually underfunded, scraping by or making less than they could in a more conventional line of work. And artisans themselves often depend on a web of less visible workers; the prestige of the chef doesn’t trickle down to the dishwashers and bussers, who are increasingly priced out of cities by NIMBY-driven failures to build. Artisan jobs are often psychically rewarding but economically precarious.
While there is no doubt that the rise of artisanship represents a form of betterment, most visibly in the quality of what we eat and drink, one might also see in it a kind of stagnation: a retreat to digital knowledge work and a playground of hand-crafted candles and kombuchas in the midst of insufficient material progress. A 1950s diet has little to recommend it, but we could do well to reclaim that era’s optimistic hunger for industrial abundance, bestowing more prestige to the development of clean energy, supersonic flights, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and other potentially transformative innovations.
McCracken urges artisans not to rest on their laurels, noting that their hard-won status could yet slip away. One threat he mentions is satire; the artisan risks becoming too smug and precious, skewered by the likes of Portlandia. Another that comes to mind is complacency as younger generations grow up in a world in which craft has already won, no longer drawing identity from the repudiation of a bland mass market. Pioneering and defiantly independent brands have sold out, like Stumptown for coffee and Stone for beer, proving that you can go corporate and still make a pretty good product. Working as a barista loses some of its edge when it means serving Stumptown at the airport.
Nonetheless, artisanship is optimistically here to stay, enriching the lives of makers and consumers alike with meaning and community. This can and should exist alongside abundant material progress. To outsiders, McCracken’s book offers an insightful guide to why this movement has succeeded beyond all expectations. Yet its greatest appeal may be to artisans themselves, the people taking risks and putting in the hours to pursue the work they really want to do, often for too little pay. This love letter to artisanship is a welcome reminder that myriad small decisions over decades to do this instead of that, to diffuse more thoughtful ways of making and consuming, have cumulatively changed the world.
Jacob Grier is the author of several books, including The Rediscovery of Tobacco, Cocktails on Tap, and Raising the Bar (forthcoming with Brett Adams).
