ART.
EXHIBITION—THE BRITISH INDUSTRIES FAIR. THosz who are only aware of the " Department of Overseas Trade " through the strictures of the Geddes Report might well be impreesed by the exhibition promoted by this organization now being held in that strange "Vermiform Appendix" to what was once the White City. If this prove the Department's Swan Song it is a wonderfully lusty one, proclaiming vigour and enterprise, both in itself and its proteges.
The catalogue, with its alphabetical indices in seven languages, is alone impressive—possibly more impressive than the exhibition itself, which, though eloquent of what Capital and Labour may combine to produce, shows how curiously shy are the generality of manufacturers of entrusting their designs to competent .designers. Here and there one seems to detect the beneficent results of propaganda by the Design and Industries Association, but with a few honourable exceptions the china, glass and silver- ware stalls are remarkable as displays of industry rather than of enlightened design.
Of the many technical exhibits such as dyestuffs, chemicals, optical and other apparatus and special instruments and components of all sorts I am not competent to speak, though they make an imposing show and are doubtless admirable, if not unrivalled. These things are for the bona fide buyers for home and overseas markets "—that mysterious body to which admission to the fair is jealously restricted, and which straddles Apollyon-like across the road that leads from the factories to the public. The business of the buyer is, obviously, to get the public what it wants without troubling his head about what it ought to want, but the system seems rather to result in the public being allowed to see only what the buyer thinks it wants.
My acquaintance amongst buyers is not large, and perhaps not very fortunate, but those that 1 have been privileged to meet who were concerned with articled into which considerations of beauty are supposed to enter have not impressed me as being particularly fitted for the role of guide and arbiter in matters of taste, save in the departments of dress and textiles. For the reason that the average taste and education of " the bona ,fide buyer " is probably at a lower level than the taste and education of the public to which he ministers, it seems a pity that this highly representative fair could not have been thrown open to the ordinary shopper as well as to the shopkeeper, so that the manufacturer might see the consumer face to face and not
through the retailer's buyer, darkly. C. W.-E.
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