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Arts and Crafts

The arts and crafts movement was an aesthetic movement that arose in Britain and the U.S. during the late 19th century. It was a response to industrial revolution, and the assembly line style of manufacturing. Many of its strongest supporters believed that machines were the root of all soulless, mundane, repetitive evils and glorified the craftsman’s pride in their work.

Although the arts and crafts movement was a response to the increasing amount of machinery and machine made products in everyday life, it was not anti-machine or anti-modern in any way. Many proponents of the movement wanted to make their crafts more affordable or remove the repetitive tasks and machines were capable of doing that. It was the handmade appeal that people were searching for, often leaving parts of crafts slightly unfinished to shows its rustic originality.

Arts and crafts helped to reverse the notion that arose during the industrial revolution that humans are the slaves to machines. A craftsman should master the machine to do his bidding. Certain design elements were common, including the increasing spontaneous personality of the designer coming out through the craft, instead of old, tired designs. They were often rustic looking with repeating designs.

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