Well, that's not exactly the intent with kintsukuroi and kintsugi. The idea is that you've got a beautiful, usually older piece with a rich history, and the break becomes part of that history, as does the repair. The repair is done with intrinsically valuable material, usually far more valuable than the object it's fixing, and so increases its value. And in doing all that, the piece becomes more beautiful than its unbroken mates.Valerie Adams wrote:Definitely a matter of personal taste, but the idea of one of us accidentally breaking a piece, and then figuring out a way to bandage it back together and then call it 'enhanced' reminds me too much of the pieces I see with bubbles blown through them being named things like "Eye of the Storm." Intentional design is something I work hard to achieve so it annoys me to see failures passed off as design. Silk purse from sow's ear is one thing; if something is truly made better by manipulation, I'm all in. But most often what I see amounts to polishing turds.
As hard as it is to discard pieces that don't survive the process (at whatever the stage they were in), there's a learning experience that's more valuable to me than selling substandard work.
Now obviously, I know there are exceptions, like pieces in museums. But until my work is of that quality, broken pieces in my studio are given a decent farewell and good riddance.
I don't know how I feel about it applied to an accidentally broken work of glass; I don't think our culture really has a place for the notion of damage increasing the beauty of a piece, at least not with glass until it is really old. Somewhere in my mind is this picture of a frantic Japanese guy breaking an heirloom and promising his angry host that fixing it would actually improve it...
I don't think we like to cede that much control over works of art; if a broken piece of glass wasn't the original intent, the repaired piece is simply flawed and valueless. It's interesting that I don't feel the same if the idea was to break the piece deliberately and make the repair part of the design. Then, it somehow becomes ok, even innovative.