
Edmund de Waal and the strange alchemy of porcelain - petewailes
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/magazine/edmund-de-waal-and-the-strange-alchemy-of-porcelain.html
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theoh
There are a few points about de Waal that I think are worth mentioning. A lot
of what he does is "adaptive" for someone in his situation: accept flaws,
celebrate chance, don't sweat the small stuff. Keep producing. He can seem a
bit twee at times and I think that is a problem with aestheticism in general.
Once you start finding interesting sensory phenomena everywhere, it's
difficult to make decisions about aesthetic value, and easy to start declaring
everything "wonderful" and "perfect".

