In praise of artsy-craftsy

OCTAVO Discussion 6

When Leonardo shifts into detective mode, he astonishes everyone at the print shop with his ability to make connections that ordinary humans cannot. To them, his observations seem like sleight of hand, a kind of trick. “How can you know all this?” asked Aldo, dumbfounded.

I think we can look to Arthur C. Clarke for the answer, if slightly paraphrased: Sufficiently advanced thinking is indistinguishable from magic.

Leonardo’s quick eyes and curious mind placed him miles ahead of his contemporaries. He had brought his thinking to the level of high craft, and the results were nothing less than astonishing. In Octavo, Leonardo is a better Sherlock Holmes than Sherlock Holmes.

The term artsy-craftsy is often applied to people who prefer creative pursuits to the “real work” of making money or fulfilling social obligations. Those who use that term to disparage creators see themselves as the hardworking ants to the lazy grasshoppers—those irresponsible people who waste the whole summer fiddling away. It’s an assertion of virtue, even superiority. It rarely occurs to them that making art may be more work than making money, especially if you’re trying to make money with your art, as Leonardo did.

Leonardo’s The Head if the Virgin was nothing if not artsy-craftsy.

Leonardo’s superpower was his insatiable curiosity, which he was able to develop through his eyes and hands—by seeing, drawing, painting, sculpting, making, and, ultimately, thinking. All these skills require the application of craft, and craft is work. When you remove craft from the pursuit of art, what you get is bad art.

I’ve always loved music, especially pop music. I listened intently to the radio as a child. As a teenager I sang, played guitar, wrote songs, and was nearly chosen for a part in the Monkees. (Yes, the Monkees!) But I finally realized music would never be my profession. I couldn’t abide the daily hours of practice necessary to activate my musical ideas. My downfall was insufficient craft.

Peter Tork (pictured right) stole my part in the Monkees!

Here’s the point: When people call you artsy-craftsy, smile and say thank you. Take it as a compliment. If they call you artsy-fartsy, however, punch them in the nose. Only if you’ve had boxing lessons, obviously.

Book talk.

Craft was king at the Aldine Press, where Leonardo hoped to publish his notebooks (at least in my story). Craft is the result of getting geeky over the smallest details, whether your art form of choice is painting, music, performing, writing, science, business, cooking, sports, or even type design. Once Aldo Manuzio got the bit between his teeth, he not only pioneered the publication of octavos, but found myriad ways to improve the public’s reading experience through the advancement of craft.

Aldo Manuzio, proprietor of the Aldine Press. (Engraving: Sperandio Maffeis)

It’s surprising that the greatest printer of the Renaissance was able to change the course of publishing history—not to mention the shape of literature—working from a cramped shop in Venice, using secondhand equipment.

His partner, Andrea Torresani, had started the press with a business partner, Pier Francesco Barbarigo. They bought the equipment from the estate of Nicolas Jensen, another great printer and type designer in Venice. While Aldo’s name was on the door, he owned only 20 percent of Torresani’s share of the business. Aldo’s role was editing and production; the other two men took care of the financial and operational parts of the business.

Nicolas Jensen’s eponymous typeface. Note the regular spacing of the letters.

If you go to Venice, you can find the official location of the Aldine Press in the Sestiere di San Polo at 2311 Rio Tera Secondo. There’s a commemorative plaque next to the door. However, that’s not the actual location. The plaque was an apparent attempt by an unscrupulous landlord to increase the value of his property three centuries later. The real location is down the street and around the corner at 2343 Calle della Chiesa. How do we know this? From letters addressed to Aldo, who both worked and lived at that address. There’s no plaque next to the door—just a sign for the restaurant Due Colonne.

The falsely claimed location of the Aldine Press.

The true location, now a pizza restaurant.

I have to confess: I cheated. I have Leonardo and Melzi arriving at the San Polo print shop in the spring of 1508. But in 1505 Aldo had already moved the shop into Torresani’s house. The family house is long gone, demolished to make room for a bank. I just thought, well, the older address makes a better film location—in case anyone wants to produce a high-budget ten-part streaming series on Netflix. (Hint, hint.)

Design talk.

Aldo wasn’t really a designer. He was mostly an editor. He hired Francesco Griffo to design the typefaces and page layouts. But he did have an eye for beauty.

Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, also had an eye for beauty. He, too, was not a designer. Yet he revered design. He often told the story of how his adoptive father had paid attention to the smallest details of the cabinets he crafted in his home workshop. Steve once asked him, “Why do you spend so much time making the backs of the cabinets look so perfect? No one will ever know what they look like!”

His father answered, “Yes, but I’ll know.”

So when Steve’s engineering team was designing the insides of the iPhone, he made sure the elements looked good together. And when they were rounding the corners of the case, he made sure the quarter-circle arcs blended seamlessly with the straight sides, instead of leaving an optical “bump” where curve meets straightaway. This is the kind of thing type designers do—they shape their letters for the requirements of the eye instead of the dictates of expediency.

A geometric “O” versus an optical “O.” See the difference?

Aldo not only led the way to typographic excellence, but also promoted the consistent use of punctuation—the comma, colon, semicolon, apostrophe, accents, and period. And with Griffo, he invented the first set of italics.

Italics served a practical purpose at the Aldine Press: they saved space, which meant they saved on the high cost of paper. Publishing is an art, but it’s also a business. There’s a need for craft in both.

Murder of the week.

Craft may not be dead, but it’s in critical condition. Hard-won skills are rapidly being replaced by the work of AI and intelligent machines.

Should we care?

It’s reasonable to think that, okay, a few people will lose their jobs. But everyone else will gain the ability to get drudge work done more cheaply. And then we can dispense with the tedious and messy business of working with other people, right?

Maybe, but AI will soon come for your own job, sophisticated though it may be. This is the waterfall of obsolescence, or what I called “The Robot Curve” in my book Metaskills. Skills are becoming obsolete at an accelerating pace.

The Robot Curve lowers both the cost—and value—of work.

At the top of the waterfall is creative work— unique, imaginative, non-routine. But over time creative work becomes standardized so it can be taught to professionals. We might call this skilled work.

Skilled work is still valuable and costly, so over time it gets turned into rote work, work that anyone can do for minimum wage.

And finally, through the application of AI and intelligent machines, rote work is converted to robotic work, driving the cost to zero and dispensing with the need for humans.

What we’re finding is that AI is getting clever enough to eliminate the rote stage entirely, going straight from skilled work to robotic work.

While robotic work can be a net benefit in terms of time and money, it can also rob society of the craft skills that lead to mastery. With less need for craft, especially craft that requires the human hand, we run the risk of separating ourselves from our own human nature. In a sense, we’re turning ourselves into robots, easily satisfied with anodyne results in business, art, and life.

Douglas Rushkoff asks a lot of interesting questions, but one from his essay Artificial Creativity really stuck with me: “There’s something anonymous about AI music and art that is ultimately dissatisfying to anyone paying attention. Music is a medium—something that conveys meaning from one person to another. If there’s no one on the other side, what is it?”

Your turn.

Have you ever experienced an example of AI art that inspired you? In what way? Do you think the human race will ever produce another Leonardo? Are the days of the Renaissance polymath over? In what ways are you holding onto the human element in your life?

While I have you, it might be a good time to take your pulse on the timing of the Wednesday Octavo episodes, which are now clocking in at 20 minutes each. Are they too long? Too short? Too often? Not often enough? Let’s take a quick poll.

Wherever our journey takes us, I want to you to know I don’t take your companionship lightly. Your support is truly a gift to me, and to the rest of the group. See you next time!