I have been thinking about this question for a long time, looking at the beauty of the ceramics my parents have been making for as long as I can remember: how did it happen that beautiful ceramics in Ukraine were replaced by frankly ugly corals?
It's simple: you don't need to look at the past through modern eyes, and then everything becomes clear.
1. In traditional society, value is determined NOT by beauty,
but by rarity and the path that an item must travel to reach its owner.
Therefore:
• Turkish coral → travels across seas, through auctions, merchants → has the “power of the path”
• ceramic bead → made in a village → has no social “journey”
An item that “comes from afar” is perceived as:
• higher status
• greater prestige
• a symbol of power
• a symbol of wealth
• proof that a man could pay
• proof that a woman is valuable
That is, it has a social value greater than its artistic value.
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2. “Beautiful” in traditional society = “expensive,” not “aesthetically perfect”
Because of this:
• clay → cheap → no status
• glass → more expensive → status
• coral → most expensive → most prestigious
And the fact that coral is:
• uneven
• crooked
• faded
• darkens
• breaks
• flakes
was never considered.
Because in traditional communities, beauty is not about the eyes, but about the wallet.
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3. Aesthetics in the 18th–19th centuries ≠ aesthetics in the 21st century
What we value today as:
• geometry
• pure form
• even rhythm
• color accuracy
• material stability
• minimalism
- simply did not exist as criteria in the 19th century.
Back then, what mattered was:
• brightness
• volume
• number of strings
• rarity of material
• “expensiveness”
• “so that others could see that the man had money to buy it”
Therefore, beads = a symbol of social success.
Ceramics = a symbol of everyday life.
Even if ceramics were more beautiful, their beauty was not what was measured.
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4. Why did beads win instantly?
Because they were:
• RED (the sacred color of blood and life → a cult symbol)
• FOREIGN (everything foreign = magical, rich, powerful)
• RARE (impossible to make in a village)
• EXPENSIVE (and therefore status symbols)
And now I will state the main idea:
The beads won not because they were better.
They won because they were not local.
In traditional culture, value is placed on things you cannot make yourself.
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5. If ceramics could be made in the village, their status automatically declined.
But corals, which came from the distant sea, had the “power of the journey.”
This is more important than aesthetics.
6. And now the most important thing:
If the ceramic beads made by Mytskani had existed back then, they could have competed with coral.
Because they change the very paradigm of beauty.
In the 19th century, perfectly smooth, perfectly thin, repeatedly fired, saturated ceramics simply did NOT exist.
They were:
• rougher
• less precise
• without saturated enamels
• without small stable forms
It's a pity that my father will never read this: if he had invented the flawless Mitzkan necklaces a few hundred years ago, no Turkish goods would have become so firmly established among our common people! The tradition itself would have changed, and we wouldn't have had to wait for the artistic revolutions of the 20th century to understand that perfection is perfection, and let the foreign stuff hide!
Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to stop living in the past and admiring foreign things. What is ours is what is valuable! Our heritage, our art, our vision of the world, our conscience, our ability to protect what is OURS!
The photo shows ceramics that we, the Mytskans, make with our OWN hands! And we show them to you here: https://mytskanceramics.com
Anatoliy Mytskan, son of Roman Mytskan, founder of the family business
