Musings: Paper Castle

Had to post this as I am obsessed with paper craft and interested in its current re-emergence into art culture. Found this image of a castle by a young art student in Tokyo by the name of Wataru Itou, on the Makezine website, while browsing the internet for craft photographs.
I have begun noticing a resurgence of craft not only in visual art culture, but in many aspects of consumer culture as well. Etsy.com for example is an online space developed expressly for handmade objects. Kirsten Hassenfeld is another artist that comes to mind when considering this re-emergence, Hassenfeld does not deny her satisfaction in romanticizing the ephemeral, and for that matter, many of the installation artists at Rice Art Gallery seem to use consumer grade materials to reflect on the sublime nature of a well-constructed space. In photography, it is the current popularity of formalist photography, now a days when a photographer claims they only use 4x5 sheet film, one immediately must take them seriously, because that isn't easy in this digital age.
And that's just it, I think there are two fold reasons for this new trend, one is the reaction to Post-modernism in which the ideals of craft were called into question. Craft was seen as problematic, it enforced a concept of perfection and assumption that there was a 'right' way of representing something. The second is this digital age in which photographs are everywhere, each and every online profile has an image associated with it, the image has become meaningless, and that's just the beginning. Everything is suppose to take place faster in this digital revolution, and for the most part, it is. So, artists and craft people alike are slowing down, revisiting their roots, questioning what handmade vs. digital means. I don't think there's an answer yet, but there is something about an object that is inherently more valuable than a digital file. My graphic designer told me to leave a handwritten note in every leave-behind because people are less likely to throw it away knowing that you spent time on it. Digital media is abstract, it exists in code, on screens, it disappears. Considering the work of DaVinci, the Romans, the images of Holocaust victims, perhaps our visual culture has not quite denied the belief that it is still the meaningful object that has the potential to live 'forever'.