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Ritual and Craft, 2026Beauty in a utilitarian object arises from the fulfillment of a function over a long period of time. An everyday object that bears the marks of repeated use is no longer merely functional, but a vessel of experience and time. Therein, in the mark, lies a resistance against the crisis of beauty in contemporary culture: against the polished, the flawless, the frictionless. Today, beauty is all too often confused with pleasingness, with that which causes no irritation. The frictionless pleases, but it does not touch you: it has no depth, no trace and no time. It is replaced as soon as it no longer appears new. The rough ages (altert, Gebrauch). The smooth wears out (veraltet, Verbrauch).

To understand this, a distinction between Erlebnis and Erfahrung is needed – between an immediate occurrence and a lived experience. The Erlebnis is intense, immediate and transient – it hits us from outside, excites and passes. Erfahrung, by contrast, arises through repetition, friction, and time. It transforms the person who undergoes it. Walter Benjamin defined this distinction in his essay The Storyteller, Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov: Erfahrung is that which accumulates over time and can be passed on – it is the foundation of craft, tradition and storytelling. Erlebnis, on the other hand, is the shock of the moment, that leaves no trace because it is not processed, but only consumed. Objects that bear no traces, that do not change, and that accumulate no history, are occurrences – not experiences. They excite, but they leave nothing behind within us. An object, then, that truly functions turns use itself into an experience – into an act that structures time.

What opposes the lived experience is the loss of ritual. What has replaced it today is the immediate occurrence – the event, permanent novelty, or instant accessibility. A culture that replaces ritual with mere occurrence loses the capacity for depth. Everything remains on the surface. Everything must be immediately consumable. 

In this regard, craft is also a form of ritual, that understands repetition not as routine, but as a discipline of attention. Both make use of the sameness of form to render ever smaller deviations legible: hundreds repetitions of the same gesture create a hand that has learned to feel the difference. To put it pointedly, this is how the repetition of the craftsman differs from that of the automated factory: the factory repeats to make attention redundant, the workshop repeats to make it inexhaustible. Ritual and craft, in this way, both resist acceleration and generate depth through time.

Attention and repetition are therefore expressions of the same fundamental attitude, that inseparably links aesthetics, craft, and sustainability: not as a political agenda, but as a lived practice — as a long, slow, collective answer to the question of how one deals with the things around us, and thereby, how one inhabits the world.

Walter Benjamin, Der Erzähler, Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows, 1936.
Byung-Chul Han, Errettung des Schönen, 2020.
Byung-Chul Han, Vom Verschwinden der Rituale, 2019.
Richard Sennett, Handwerk, 2014.
Martin Heidegger, Bauen Wohnen Denken, 1951.