My "Chicken or Egg" Question on Design Gets an Answer

From two traditional conservative writers

An example of an abstracted textile print,
often of unidentifiable flora and foliage,
popular at Kravitz, a NYDC showroom.

I had asked in my previous blog post "From MAD Designers to the Public's Desires" who sets contemporary design trends: the designer or the public?

Here is insightful commentary about the sorry state of design by Laura Wood of the Thinking Housewife, who posted some of my post at her blog:

Possibly when people get more instant gratification, especially in sex and popular culture, they don’t care as much about their surroundings. When desire is sublimated, it creates more beauty in life, more craftsmanship and studied effects. Women are highly sexualized today, but less sensual in their approach to home.

Her comment is later quoted by Lawrence Auster from the View From the Right, which he explains further in terms of liberalism:

The remark goes to the heart of the traditionalist critique of liberalism. Liberalism gives people what it thinks they want, which is unimpeded satisfaction of their desires and impulses. But in doing so, it closes them off from what they really want, which is beauty, truth, and goodness, and membership in an enduring human community that embodies those things.

I am seeing a trend where people are looking for some sort of "beauty, truth, and goodness, and membership in an enduring human community that embodies those things." I mean, how long is the Emperor not going to get called at for not having any clothes? How long are people going to live in dreary grey homes? Craftsmanship is still sitting on the sidelines, and designers for the most part are not willing to follow the public’s under-the-radar demands - it costs them too much in terms of their independence, having to acquire new skills, and having to learn whole new ways of looking at things.

But, I've always said "one step at a time." It is incredible the forces that are against beauty, goodness and truth. But each little repeat pattern that defies that monumental force is, in my humble opinion, one good step away from its bottomless pit.