Utility of beauty

The knives i make takes many hours, a significant proportion of that time i spend on on the aesthetics such as hand sanding the knife, adding decorative brass/steel spacers and using exotic woods for the handle and polishing it till it shines, although none of this affects the performance of knife so why do i spend so much time on increasing the beauty of my knives?.

I have a vivid memory from my childhood where my mother asked me if i would like some designer clothes to which i replied no, she tried to appeal to me by expressing how it would look good and others will admire my clothes if they were embellished with these prestigious logos but to her dismay i said it doesn't matter what i wear,

so how did this pure utilitarian find himself spending countless hours on turning raw material into beautiful tools.

those of you reading this who are in the north of England may have been to the Royal armouries in the city of Leeds, the armouries have a colossal amount of weapons and armour built to attack and defend, the vast majority of these are beautiful weapons/armour that have ornate engravings and decorative details, some so ornate that in the time it took to craft them they could have made 20 with the same utility, although the function for this could be simply stated as representation of status which could account for most of the intent i believe there's more to it.

when it comes to making essentially a tool like a knife or sword that is of higher quality than other knives it's quality can be hidden as it's not directly tied with it's aesthetics, so how could a master craftsmen discern his higher quality work from that of lower quality?

so the way we differentiate our work is we make our knives beautiful, we spent additional hours on the knifes to hopefully equal the aesthetics with it's quality, people may presume that the knives sell because they are beautiful but the function of beauty is to be the criterion of value and quality and a marker for craftsmanship.

if we were to make our knifes that were trite we would devalue the craftsmanship to that of

the cold machine manufactured knifes that are a standard today and make the craft obsolete and lose another opportunity to instil beauty into everyday life.

Connor Taylor