Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers
wabi-sabi
“Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional.
Admittedly, the beauty of wabi-sabi is not to everyone’s liking. But I believe it is in everyone’s interest to prevent wabi-sabi from disappearing altogether. Diversity of the cultural ecology is a desirable state of affairs, especially in opposition to the accelerating trend toward the uniform digitalization of all sensory experience, wherein an electronic “reader” stands between experience and observation, and all manifestation is encoded identically...”
The importance of humanity in the manufactured world is the thread that runs through much of Koren's writing. His latest book, "The Flower Shop," which was recently published by Stone Bridge Press, is about a shop in Vienna called Blumenkraft, whose design and flower-arranging sensibility is decidedly edgy but whose relationship to its customers is humanely old-fashioned. "I loved the radical egalitarianism of it," Koren explains. "They don't lavish attention only on people with lots of money to spend." A single flower is wrapped with just as much care as two dozen; the owner walks people to the door after ringing up their purchases. Koren sees this "intersection of good design and good human relations" as a rebuke to "the idea that if costs can be minimized, everybody's a winner." The result of Blumenkraft's philosophy, Koren adds, is that its customers aren't there just to buy flowers. "All these people were coming there as if it were a church or a temple for their dose of beauty."