So...what are you saying? I'm dumb? Or I'm narcissistic?

So shallow.

“We are, however, at a critical juncture in glass history, a juncture identified with a climate of new ideas about glass and its place in the larger continuum of art…

Traditionally, the rule of art in the Western world has been to reveal and interpret the non art experience. Currently, the central artistic issues in glass are shifting from such concerns as how an object is made and perceived, or what defines its style, to considerations of why art is made and experienced, and what a work of art means or signifies beyond the experience of its formal, stylistic, and material ingredients.

Currently the field of “glass art” is awash in objects, many beautiful, some ugly, most about glass itself–material as content. But if this medium-specific subgroup is to progress beyond a fascination with the materials, the evocative contradictions of glass have to be pursued more aggressively, manifested more succinctly. There have been many superficial depictions of beauty but few examinations of the meanings of beauty though a material that so successfully conveys it.

I am not pessimistic…glass will continue to be a material in the service of meaning.”

-Ginny Ruffner, 1991, Tacoma Museum of Art, "Glass: Material in the Service of Meaning."

In the 90s and early 2000s, before the term Post-Craft appeared along with it's emphasis on abstract sculpture over traditional shapes, it seemed glass artists were worried that their art was not taken seriously by art critics and that glass artists were not receiving the attention or respect due to them by contemporary art collectors.

Ginny Ruffner, in the passage above written for the Tacoma Museum of Art, suggested this could be because of a lack of intellectual depth and a preoccupation with the physical materials of the glass itself. Glass was pretty to look at, but for it to have time-withstanding worth in the art world, she believed that it had to convey an idea or examine the meaning of something, even the beauty of itself could be in question.

It seems that recently glassblowers have taken Ruffner and her sentiment up on the challenge, insofar as they've moved away from vessel shapes towards different shapes and adopted other surface finishes that don't have the polished gloss which critics saw as glass's vanity.

Which 1980s pieces do you think she was referring to as superficial?