{"product_id":"wabisabi-for-artists-designers-poets-philosophers-9781880656129","title":"Wabi-Sabi: for Artists  Designers  Poets \u0026 Philosophers","description":"\u003cp\u003eFrom the Introduction  Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect  impermanent  and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional.  The immediate catalyst for this book was a widely publicized tea event in Japan. The Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi has long been associated with the tea ceremony  and this event promised to be a profound wabi-sabi experience. Hiroshi Teshigahara  the hereditary iemoto (grand master) of the Sogetsu school of flower arranging  had commissioned three of Japans most famous and fashionable architects to design and build their conceptions of ceremonial tea-drinking environments. Teshigahara in addition would provide a fourth design. After a three-plus-hour train and bus ride from my office in Tokyo  I arrived at the event site  the grounds of an old imperial summer residence. To my dismay I found a celebration of gorgeousness  grandeur  and elegant play  but hardly a trace of wabi-sabi. One slick tea hut  ostensibly made of paper  looked and smelled like a big white plastic umbrella. Adjacent was a structure made of glass  steel  and wood that had all the intimacy of a highrise office building. The one tea house that approached the wabi-sabi qualities I had anticipated  upon closer inspection  was fussed up with gratuitous post- modern appendages. It suddenly dawned on me that wabi-sabi  once the preeminent high-culture Japanese aesthetic and the acknowledged centerpiece of tea  was becoming-had become?-an endangered species.  Admittedly  the beauty of wabi-sabi is not to everyones liking. But I believe it is in everyones interest to prevent wabi-sabi from disappearing altogether. Diversity of the cultural ecology is a desirable state of affairs  especially in opposition to the accelerating trend toward the uniform digitalization of all sensory experience  wherein an electronic \"reader\" stands between experience and observation  and all manifestation is encoded identically.  In Japan  however  unlike Europe and to a lesser extent America  precious little material culture has been saved. So in Japan  saving a universe of beauty from extinction means  at this late date  not merely preserving particul\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45789439754293,"sku":"ByrdShop_1880656124","price":35.87,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9781880656129.jpg?v=1784691302","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/wabisabi-for-artists-designers-poets-philosophers-9781880656129","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}