David Barnett
I can totally appreciate your thoughtful, heartfelt and revealing statement and can certainly understand and share how you feel. While there are groups that celebrate and promote high standards in furniture construction, such as the SAPFM and The Furniture Society, the focus is more on traditional furniture makers and construction and less so on furniture from industrial designers and manufacturers. Consensus naturally varies from differing furniture backgrounds, contexts, and real-world applicability.

For example, I personally choose not to live with period furniture, no matter how well it's constructed as it's not to my taste. I simply detest most anything preceding the Art Nouveau, and can far better appreciate mid-century modern, for example, much which would probably fall short of period furniture construction standards. Furniture covers too much ground, is often too personal, too contextual within a particular cultural or design milieu to submit it to a consensus of construction standards. What's more, sometimes construction becomes legitimately secondary to style.

I've known several period makers, very good at what they did, who've given up trying to make livings due to market challenges. One very talented designer and maker now owns a video and game rental store in a small New England town. I understand their disappointment when they see others get huge prices for sculpted MDF covered in veneer. I've watched buyers in a major NYC craft show walk by beautifully crafted satinwood writing desks without a glance, heading for glass-topped tables resting on aesthetically and geometrically questionable bases covered in garish kewazinga, so I do understand.

In another field, art metalsmithing, the schools are turning out scores of graduates with substandard skills and immeasurably worse artistic inclinations, where "saying something" rarely comes across in the work itself but only in the droning blah-blah artist statements in their CVs or brochures.

So yes, it's discouraging, and not just for woodworkers, but I'm dubious whether promoting standards really has the desired broad and uplifting effect, especially in fields so variegated as the crafts. Sure, one can buy a GIA certified diamond, but again, that has nothing to do with color cut by the best of Idar-Oberstein, not to mention the superb gem carvers now producing heretofore unseen wonders. Standards lag.

You're right, though; it is an interesting problem and one that deserves to be discussed, although I'll admit it makes me not a little dizzy when I look too deeply into it.

I really want to say one more thing. It's so gratifying to find you share common ground with someone whom you initially suspect has little in common. It's often overlooked, but the main reason this so often takes place on Wood Central is overwhelmingly due to Ellis Walentine, who has fostered such open and free discussion, not without some risk, keeping Wood Central a space with plenty of room to breathe and share and learn, and for this, I wish to once again say thank you.