Tomorrow our OpenTent team gathers at a hotel deep in the Catskills for a full team retreat. We’re celebrating TEN years of OpenTent…aka Open10t!!!1
Each time we do a team retreat I pick a theme, inspired by the setting. In Kitty Hawk it was the Wright Brothers, obviously. In Denver it was the American rail system, which was at the heart of making Denver the city it became.
This year our theme is the Arts and Crafts Movement.
This movement got started in England in the late 19th Century, but then made its way to America and the Catskills became a central gathering place for it. There were multiple arts colonies, communities where people lived together in the summer or year round to make art and generally try to figure out a way of bringing craft into the modern industrial workplace.
One of the most notable communities was called Byrdcliffe, which was pretty large but the guy who ran it was kind of rigid and annoying so one of the members, Hervey, broke off to form the Maverick Art Colony nearby. Maverick started hosting a huge arts festival on the weekend of the full moon of August (like this weekend!). Thousands of people attended at its peak, and the weekend apparently typically culminated in an orgy in the woods.2 The Maverick festival helped shape the Catskills as a destination for arts-centered hippie retreats and is seen as a forerunner to Woodstock in 1969.
The Maverick Theater, and some festival attendees
The movement also birthed some iconic designs:
Stickley chair
William Morris wallpaper
Rookwood pottery
Tiffany lamps
Craftsman bungalows - still in style!
But the A+C Movement was much more than a certain artistic style. The central ideas were about the relationship of art and work. From the preface of Art and Labor by Eileen Boris3:
“‘The craftsman ideal’…was a reaction against industrialization, urbanization, modernization - against what we can more precisely call the growth of a bureaucratized corporate structure in the context of capitalist social relations…By uniting art with labor, craftsmanship hoped to counter the fragmentation that had destroyed beauty in the process of degrading work.”
In other words: when you treat workers like another cog in the machine, you not only end up with a worse product but you also create social problems because you are asking workers to separate themselves from their own creative spirit. Encouraging each person to see themselves as a craftsman is the antidote.
The more I learned about the Arts and Crafts Movement the more I was amazed at how relevant it is for this moment.
Reuniting the worker with their craft: as AI can do more and more of our work, we run the risk of just treating humans as prompters for the technology. The people who currently have those jobs report higher rates of feeling lonely and depressed at work. Of course! AI is a great tool to help our work but we humans are at our best when we connected from beginning to end with the work in front of us and can feel pride in our creation.
From Boris’s book: “Machinery went hand in hand with the commercialization of social life, encouraging fads and fashion, and thereby developing a demand for “artificial” goods. The assault on the machine [by the Arts and Crafts leaders] was essentially an attack on the deadening process of work under industrial capitalism as well as a condemnation of shoddy goods…Art came to mean “anything that is well done” - as in done with a human spirit.”
Honest materials: the movement emphasizes straightforward and simple materials, used in ways that respect the nature of the material. This was a rejection of the way modern industrial methods could fabricate anything that looked like its original material but wasn’t really. In the age of AI Slop, it’s natural to imagine a rejection of that kind of artificial fabrication and a preference for what can clearly be seen as Authentic.
Guild/studio structure: A+C movement leaders turned the medieval concept of a “guild” to imagine “the factory as it might be”: a beautiful, intentional place where people gathered to learn from each other and do their craft in community. With the advent of “digital labor” (subject of a future issue), it is feeling as important than ever to imagine “the workplace as it might be” and truly optimize for human happiness and meaning-making in addition to all our work running around optimizing for technology.
Organic architecture: this was best seen in the design of Craftsman houses, which emphasized simple and open floor plans in contrast to the Victorian mansions of the time with their many little rooms and ornate decoration. “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful” urged William Morris. Our retreat hotel describes having a “Scandinavian design” which is their term for basic, wood panel + glass design. Simplicity has a timeless appeal - worth remembering amid all the noise in our world these days.
“Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality.”
We gotta keep the art in the work y’all!
Re: Listen
Heidi shared a sweet story about helping her daughter navigate a tricky situation on her high school sports team by using AI as a thought partner to draft an email to her coach
Adir noted “I continue to realize more and more that so many solutions to our 'big world' problems can be sourced in the minds of our youngest. And I would add one piece to your beautiful closing at the end, which is once I realize they're trying to tell me about their 'shoes,' what's really lurking behind that urge? That I think unlocks some other powerful tools of being in relationship.“
1 Yes I’ve been waiting for ten years to be able to make this joke.
2 Shortly after the festivals started, Hervey’s wife left him and took their two sons with her…understandably…
3 Which is a really excellent look at the A+C movement through the lens of its approach to work. It’s the only book I could find that focused on this angle as opposed to just looking at the art and artists. It’s out of print, I had to buy it from a used bookstore which made me feel really legit. Even when all of the world’s information is in your hand it still feels amazing to hold someone’s deep research and thinking in your hand and underline sentences with a pencil…what’s that about?