Love Quote by William Morris

Morris draws a hard line that feels almost impolite in today’s culture of “let people enjoy things.” But the bluntness is the point: he isn’t trying to refine your taste so much as weaponize it. If you can’t yet love “real art,” he argues, you can still develop a moral reflex against the counterfeit. Hatred becomes training wheels for discernment.

The subtext is deeply political. Morris was a designer who watched industrial capitalism turn craft into commodity and ornament into sales tactic. “Sham art” isn’t merely bad taste; it’s a symptom of a system that values cheap effect over honest making. In the Arts and Crafts context, authenticity lives in materials, labor, and intention: what something is, how it’s made, and whether it respects the human hands behind it. “Sham” suggests not just inferiority but deception - a product pretending to be what it isn’t, a veneer of beauty masking extraction and haste.

The rhetorical move is clever: he lowers the entry bar while raising the stakes. You don’t need elite education to start; you need only the capacity to feel when something is trying to fool you. That’s an egalitarian argument delivered with a scold’s cadence. Morris turns aesthetic judgment into civic hygiene: if a public learns to reject the fake, the market for fakery shrinks, and conditions for real art - time, skill, fair labor - become imaginable again. In his hands, taste isn’t a hobby; it’s resistance.