Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects

About the Book

Things matter. So why are we losing touch with them?

From the former director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York comes a timely and passionate case for the role of the well-designed object in the digital age. In this delightful exploration of craft in its many forms, curator and scholar Glenn Adamson explores how raw materials, tools, design and technique come together to produce objects of beauty and utility.

A thoughtful meditation on the value of care and attention in an age of disappearing things, Fewer, Better Things invites us to reconnect with the physical world and its objects.

About the Author :
Glenn Adamson is a senior scholar at the Yale Center for British Art and works across the fields of design, craft, and contemporary art. Until March 2016 he was the director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and has been head of research at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and curator at the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee. His books include Art in the Making (coauthored with Julia Bryan-Wilson) and The Craft Reader, among others. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Review :
A powerful and personal account of the meaning and wonder of craft by one of its leading voices. Through a compelling mix of family lore and cultural history, Adamson explores the practice and purpose of craft with elegance and insight Inspiring . . . Fewer, Better Things is deeply personal, full of stories about Adamson’s family that are by turns funny, eye-opening, and moving . . . Adamson invites readers to follow along on a series of thought experiments about the objects in our lives, our relationships to them, what they mean, and how we might go about distilling them so that our material footprint is greatly reduced. And this isn’t just an exercise -- the future of humanity might depend on it. [Adamson] makes a powerful case for limiting our purchases to things (including food) that we find to be beautiful, meaningful, or useful. Adamson, a former director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and author of several books on craft, views the suffering of the natural world through the prism of our increasingly tortured relationship with it. Genial and elegant writing . . . Combining elements of memoir, reportage, material history, and curatorial studies, Fewer, Better Things is an erudite but accessible global survey of the contemporary material landscape and how we can be better informed to shape it . . . For the design-inclined, Fewer, Better Things will sharpen the way you think about the world around you. If we are to navigate out of our cluttered and over-accessorized worlds, we need the kind of critical thinking that Fewer, Better Things beautifully and succinctly delivers. Reflecting a lifetime of study on material intelligence, Glenn Adamson’s remarkable book asks us to radically reconsider the objects we choose to surround ourselves with. I thoroughly enjoyed it and can see it becoming a manifesto for modern living. Rich with examples and stories of objects and their makers . . . Adamson’s crafty enthusiasm is infectious. In Fewer, Better Things, scholar and former museum curator Glenn Adamson inspires readers to reflect on the physical items they encounter . . . Adamson argues that objects cross cultural barriers . . . and provide a shared understanding of culture and history. By creating meaningful connections to objects, we can move towards a sustainable world where we surround ourselves with fewer, but better, things. This new attention to craft, to work done through some close contact between hand and thing, has been enriched by the publication of The Craft Reader . . . Even readers who think they're not interested in craft will be more engaged than they expected, if they give the anthology half a chance. At a time when technical skill has been widely dismissed or outsourced in the production of art, Glenn Adamson crucially adds an entire spectrum of hand-crafted objects to the creative history of the post-war era. [Adamson] is the best writer on craft since Peter Dormer . . . From the politics of labour to the intricacies of lacemaking, this is a superb book that covers a huge territory and is stuffed full of ideas and unexpected associations.