There is a building in Newark, Ohio, shaped like a giant picnic basket. It was the headquarters of the Longaberger Company, a basket empire that at its peak in the late 1990s generated $1 billion in annual revenue through a network of 70,000 home sales consultants, mostly women, selling handwoven baskets at prices that made no economic sense unless you understood what was actually being sold. Hyperallergic's Poppy DeltaDawn traces the full story: how Longaberger commodified craft, packaged settler nostalgia, and built a direct-sales empire on the fantasy that a handmade American object could resist the tide of mass production. The building is empty now. The fantasy did not hold.
Craft as National Mythology
Longaberger is a case study in what happens when 'authentic craft' becomes a brand rather than a practice. The baskets were handmade, yes, in the Appalachian tradition. But they were handmade at scale, sold through a multilevel marketing structure, and priced as luxury objects whose value derived entirely from narrative, not utility. This is the same logic the art market runs on, and it is not accidental that Artnet is currently covering both the Christie's $4.5 billion haul and the intimate, nourishing paintings of Maria Farrar in the same news cycle. The art market is also, at its core, a machine for converting objects into myths and myths into prices.
IKEA's Answer and Its Limits
The week's other domestic-object story is IKEA's KOMPISHANG collection, 12 portable pieces for city renters and students, designed to move with you rather than accumulate. It is the anti-Longaberger: explicitly temporary, tool-free, disposable by design. Where Longaberger sold permanence and heritage, IKEA is selling mobility and release. Both are selling a relationship to domestic life, which is to say, both are in the myth business. The Culture Slop essay by Nicolas Cevallos on iPods as modern heirlooms asks the question neither company can fully answer: what does it mean to buy for forever in an age of disposable goods? Longaberger tried to answer it with a basket. The basket outlasted the building. That might be enough.