This remarkable object was a gift, manufactured centrally in the capitol (not sure whether it was Beijing in those days) and then distributed en masse to various regional governors, who could use it to boast of their intimacy with the emperor, etc. when guests at their dinners drank from the cup. It’s a high-status object, the kind of gift that bestows prestige and strengthens social ties, and the thing MacGregor likes so much about it is the little caption plate listing the object’s credits: “Wooden core by Li, Lacquering by Yi, Top Coat Lacquering by Dang, Handles by Gu,” etc. True, it’s an extremely complicated proposition to make a large object like this (it’s a little bigger than my hand) out of lacquer, which is sap gathered from a tree. But only the Chinese, it’s implied, would find a way to build a bureacracy and mass-produce an object that embodies the essence of high-quality craftsmanship.
I’m guessing this topic will come up again and again as we get closer to the modern period. We want to have our cake and eat it too: we want gorgeous, unique objects, each individually crafted with love; and we want them cheaply mass-produced, so that everybody in the world can have one. Which is it going to be? Err too much on the one side of the equation, and nothing works and life is quirky, strange, and uncomfortable; err too much to the other extreme, and lose your soul. I work in an art form that, economically speaking, should have gone away with the destruction of the medieval guilds—there’s no good reason to take the time and care and fussing over every detail of an opera, the way we do. Or we should mass-produce it, in which case we’d be making movies, not operas. Which of you, I wonder, bother to sit through every minute of the credits at the end of the movies you enjoy, out of respect for the long list of artists who worked together to mass-produce the thing you just enjoyed?
Another view of the cup:
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