Making Beauty
A British Museum video about the artist Yamamoto Akane has to be one of my favourite links posted to Metafilter in months. What a stunning amount of work is conveyed in those few minutes; given the failure rate, the single object shown there must represent months of careful effort. How many of us could bear to start from scratch again and again when firings go awry?
So many of the artworks in the great museums and galleries of the world represent a comparable amount of painstaking and patient work, and are the result of years of learning, developing or—as here—inventing one’s craft. And most of us take them in during a visit in an instant and move on to the next.