Appropriation is very charged word. Usually it has been used in situations where the stronger or superior has been taking something from some that has been considered inferior. We are building too many boundaries these days and in my opinion we don't need more. Im a ceramic artist and I feel the dept we in the west owe to the Japanese ceramics culture. But if we try to make tea bowls, I feel that is something similar than if guys from Birmingham in the 60s fell in love with blues and started to play it, maybe in few years time even made couple of nice tracks which added things into the blues legacy, maybe in few more years even played with the original legends of blues. They did their part to make the culture living by adding layers into it. Other thing I didn't get was that some western (and ugly) bowls were mocked and some were praised even they were very very far from their origins and to me seemed skillfully made but tasteless. Perhaps I took it too seriously, it's good things are discussed though
Please correct! Sen no Rikyu was not a potter and tilemaker as you mention at 13.20 minutes! He was priest, important tea master and adviser to Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Chojiro was the tilemaker!
Regardless of how much reverence one places in a tea bowl it's still just a lump of clay that's been glazed and put through a firing. I'm reasonably sure the tea bowl would not complain about being filled with raspberries.
My god. What is that monstrosity of a "tea bowl" that appears on the right of the screen at about 1:56 minutes in. I've never seen a tea bowl as horrendous as that.
Neither of them were teabowl potters, so within the context of this talk, that's perfectly reasonable. They were (at the end of their careers) abstract expressionist artists NOT potters. If you notice she takes that attitude all across the video.
