艺术设计专业研究生英语选读

　　Craftsmen must attend to standards because the artifacts they make often go to the “better” sorts of people; if not gods, then perhaps nobility, or if not nobility, then at least to the wealthy.
　　God imposes a formal standard against which human worth can be measured -if a sphere is perfect, then everything else is more or less a mistake. Among humans too, some are more perfect than others – men more than women, for instance – and so it was male warriors who set the standard of humanity in Plato’s day. Crafting presupposes scales of worth, and these can specify how one person relates to another. One of the most common examples of the crafting of “persons” is to be found in the use of ornamental designs. All over Eurasia, from Spring and Autumn period of China (770-476 BC) to Tudor England, graphic insignia defined a nobleman’s prerogative both in ceremony and in ordinary life. Sometimes cultures find ways to inscribe even complex relationships in gra.phic patterns. The state of being married or non-married, chief or subordinate, is a function of one person’s relative dependence upon another. Relations such as these can be translated into geometric designs that can both reduplicate and reinforce the social order in ceremony or in more binding sorts of relations. Graphic patterns, in other words, can serve as paradigms of social order. Here, the word “paradigm” is rooted in its origin in the crafting process, referring to a model or pattern that embodied in visual form a scale of value. That scale ultimately defined a hierarchy of human worth and so could specify degrees of agency in individuals. Bearing this in mind, it would be difficult to think of a better term of those examples of graphic order that scholars have found to be in active dialogue with social organization.

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