Post #593433 by bigbrotiki on Mon, Jun 13, 2011 8:00 AM

On 2011-06-12 07:42, SilverLine wrote:
I think I read (on the Tiki Farm website perhaps) that Tiki Farm had out-produced all vintage manufacturers combined as of a couple of years ago. How this statistic is quantified, I don't know. And I may be miss-remembering.

On 2011-06-12 06:50, ron-tiki wrote:
...I started collecting vintage mugs several years before ever buying a new (tiki-revival) mug...by this time i had collected almost every vintage mug i could find. i had about 800 mugs at the time..since then i have collected over 2,000 revival mugs.. there is a good chance that the amount newer mugs have long surpassed our vintage ones by quite a bit...

Wow, so we are long past that point? I myself know that my "Wow, a new Tiki mug!" reaction has more often become a "Oh, yet another Tiki mug..." response.

I am fascinated by the change from a subculture of "ancestor worship" (the collecting of vintage mugs and other ephemera to understand and appreciate the creativity of past generations) to a fan culture with newly inspired art, and ITS appreciation. When do we reach a point where this becomes a self-perpetuating, new genre, where the context to its origin becomes less important? And at what point does it become just another "collectables" genre for consumers, like Barbie dolls?

That's why I try to create mugs that A.) have a cultural context to a place or a part of Tiki culture history, and B.) have a design that has never been done before as a mug