conspicuous creation
n. The making of art, gifts, crafts, and household items in a showy, non-subtle manner.
Examples
1997
She'll sell you lots of stuff, but basically Martha [Stewart] does not believe in store-bought. She urges us to reject mass manufacturing and mass taste and to embrace the personal and the handcrafted. What she embodies is the opposite of conspicous consumption. It is something much more demanding and appealing: conspicuous creation.
—Margaret Wente, “Martha Comes to Town,” The Globe and Mail, November 01, 1997
1994
While the women of the town flutter over the irrepressible Fausto, he begins forging a tailoring style of his own. Concluding that it's good for business to make very conspicuous creations, he designs a jacket made of live grass, a shirt with two extra sleeves and other madcap extravagances.
—Janet Maslin, “A Designer Of Clothes And a Muse In Overalls,” The New York Times, August 12, 1994
1988 (earliest)
Bierk's sources may be impeccable, but there is a sense that the show represents yet another reshuffling of the deck. The new combinations pique our curiosity, but in the end Bierk's paintings are more convincing as acts of homage than of conspicuous creation.
—Christopher Hume, “Splashy debut will turn heads,” The Toronto Star, April 15, 1988
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