Great Work: Kintsugi

The flaws in our art are proof that beauty is the domain of humans, not machines.

The unfinished sculpture, the cracked note, the wavering brushstrokes, the fractured ceramic.

Beauty lives in imperfection.

You can see this in the Japanese art of kintsugi. When a bowl breaks, artisans mend it with lacquer and powdered gold. Each crack becomes a golden line, a visible record of the bowl’s history.

As Christy Bartlett writes in Flickwerk:

“The vicissitudes of existence over time, to which all humans are susceptible, could not be clearer than in the breaks, the knocks, and the shattering to which ceramic ware too is subject.”

Great Work celebrates imperfection in the pursuit of perfection.