Selling Rhinebeck: Confrontation, Profit, and the “Mass-Anxiety Attack” of the Northeast Craft Fair

Abstract

In 1966, the American Craft Council's Northeast Assembly exulted in the success of its “Confrontation Craft Fair” in Stowe, Vermont, reporting sales of about $17,000. At its successor event, the 1981 Northeast Craft Fair at Rhinebeck, however, sales reached nearly $5,000,000 and the Fair was hailed as a triumph of craft marketing.The unprecedented success of “the Rhinebeck Fair,” as it became known in the 1970s, was the catalyst for a broader transformation—the creation of a mass market for American studio craft. There was (and still is) widespread ambivalence about these changes. Some craftspeople, gallerists, retailers, and collectors welcomed the increased accessibility and profitability of craft, whereas others regretted the end of the “hippy days.”The transformation of the Northeast Craft Fair from a countercultural attraction to a multi-million-dollar trade market put new and unique pressures on the aesthetic and social values of craftspeople and their supporters. Because of its compounding success, the community of artisans and their supporters experienced acute growing pains that forced them to evaluate their ideals. As a group, 1960s craftspeople identified themselves largely with the counterculture, but with the growing profitability of craft markets, they were increasingly compelled to engage with both mainstream commerce and the social elite. In this we can also observe a broader transformation—that of the youth counterculture movement of the 1960s and 70s into the boom-economy entrepreneurial ethos of the Reagan years.