Three stories this week, from completely different sectors, share a structural logic: the most interesting move is backward. Artists Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Bühler-Rose, and Nick Doyle are reviving marquetry and intarsia, Renaissance woodworking techniques, in an age of AI-generated imagery. Shawn Stussy is back making streetwear for himself with S/DOUBLE, returning to the founding logic of a brand he built and left. And Intel's stock has risen 490% in a year, a Wall Street bet on a company attempting to rebuild manufacturing capabilities it once abandoned for fabless efficiency.

Why Craft Returns When Automation Peaks

This is not nostalgia. It is a legibility strategy. When Artnet's J. Cabelle Ahn describes marquetry revival in the age of AI, the implicit argument is that handmade complexity becomes more meaningful as generated imagery becomes cheaper. A 2022 paper in Leonardo by Riskin et al. on craft epistemology argued that material resistance, the physical constraint of wood grain, thread count, or body weight, encodes knowledge that digital mediation cannot replicate. Taylor's inlaid wood panels are not retro. They are an argument about what counts as evidence of thought. The . The more money flows into generation, the more the hand-made appreciates as signal.

Intel as Industrial Marquetry

Intel's comeback reads differently through this lens. CEO Pat Gelsinger's push to rebuild domestic chip fabrication is, at some level, an argument that the knowledge embedded in manufacturing, the tacit skills, the process refinements, the institutional memory, cannot simply be outsourced and then recalled. Intel abandoned it. TSMC absorbed it. Getting it back requires something closer to apprenticeship than acquisition. Stussy left his brand, Stussy took on other people's logic, and now he is trying to remember what he knew before. The Renaissance woodworkers the Artnet artists are learning from encoded knowledge in grain and joint that no shortcut recovered. The avant-garde, right now, is memory work.