Between Scylla and Charybdis: Art vs. Craft

By John Valentine

The following article presents a debate about the distinction, if any, between art and craft. I have chosen the lead-in reference to the twin monsters that threatened Odysseus in Homer’s classic work The Odyssey, even though the philosophical debate about art and craft contains nothing threatening and is certainly not a matter of ‘choosing between the lesser of two evils.’ The intended effect is merely rhetorical, but there are indeed many partisans who believe that there is in fact a clear distinction between art and craft. The debate questions that belief.

What I shall argue is that all instances of craft-items are semantically and philosophically collapsible into instances of art-items. In what follows, the fictional character of Jones will defend collapsibility and that of Smith will criticize it.

Smith: Let me be clear about this. You want to argue that there is no difference between fine art and craft?

Jones: No. I shall explicate a basal theory of art simpliciterin the classification sense of art vs. non-art. I have no exact idea of what fine art is or how to define it. It seems to me that it is a high-end critical term that might have any number of necessary and sufficient conditions for definition, depending on the context and who is doing the defining. Also, many postmodernists have rejected the notion of fine art (or high art) in favor of a more democratic view of equality among artforms.

John Valentine, Beginning Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art. McGraw-Hill Primis Custom Publishing; 2nd edition (March 30, 2006).

Smith: So, to be more exact, you are claiming that there is no difference between art and craft?

Jones: Yes, in the sense that all putative craft-items are semantically and philosophically art-items.

Smith: First of all, what do you mean by the terms art and craft? Clear definitions are in order here.

Jones: When I’m discussing the term craft, I am not referencing anything akin to the ancient Greek term technê or the Latin term ars. Both of these had primary connotations of ‘applied skill’ in the making of various kinds of objects. This is how they were understood by Plato and Aristotle, and also in the Roman world. Of course, this is tricky because the two terms were often used to designate art-items that showed skill, so even at the beginning of the Western philosophical tradition there was ambiguity about art and craft. We can also find this situation in the Renaissance and thereafter.

Smith: Fair enough, so the word craft still has the separate meaning of applied skill in making. But what does it mean beyond that? Let me venture a possibility. A craft-item might be an artifact (= a humanly created item) that is either handmade or mass-produced for the subsequent purpose of some kind of utilitarian application or use. A paradigm example historically would be a quilt. Whether handmade or mass-produced, quilts have generally been regarded as craft-items that are used to keep people warm. They were rarely, if ever, thought of as art-items prior to the 20^th century and the imprimatur of artists such as Mark Rothko and their gradual appearance in art galleries and museums. (It is important to note in passing that in earlier centuries craft-items were thought to be the domain of women, while art-items were thought to be the domain of men. This has come under justifiable feminist criticism.) The upshot of this is that today there is a cultural blending of arts and crafts, but that does not entail that craft is the same thing as art. It’s still important and possible to distinguish between them. That said, what is your definition of art?

Jones: First, a word about your definition of craft. It’s true that putative craft-items could be handmade or mass-produced (so can art-items), but it is not clear that they are inevitably made for the subsequent purpose of utilitarian application or use. In your own example, you concede that quilts have found their way into art museums and galleries, and that probably entails that they are being noticed for something other than use per se—perhaps their aesthetic properties as such. Are you familiar with Jastrow’s duck/rabbit image?

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917. Urinal "readymade" signed R. Mutt; early example of "Dada" art. A paradigmatic example of found-art. Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz.

Smith: I am but how is it relevant here?

Jones: Just in the sense that whether one sees a duck or a rabbit in the pattern is a matter of ‘perceptual sets,’ or what the philosopher Wittgenstein regarded as dispositions to see one way rather than another based on context and previous conditioning. We might extend the notion of perceptual sets to include ways of aesthetic vs. non-aesthetic seeing. A quilt may be observed strictly in terms of its low-end aesthetic qualities such as line, shape, and color—or the gestalts of these phenomena—or it may be perceptually shifted so that we only observe a non-aesthetic quality. But what indeed is the latter? In some cases, yes, it could be utilitarian function as intentionally ‘put into’ the putative craft-item (warmth), but as already noted, not every craft-item has or is intended to have such a function. Take the example of an ordinary hammer. If we shift away from any aesthetic qualities it might have, we seem only to be left with the hammer’s utilitarian use. Fair enough, but wouldn’t it be odd to say that an ordinary hammer is a craft-item, akin to a quilt? No doubt some degree of applied skill went into making the hammer (technê) and we are likely to use it in various construction modalities, but beyond that there seems to be nothing extra that makes it, like a quilt, into a putative craft-item. Perhaps as a function of our enculturation, we tend to think that something extra is going on with a quilt that makes it craft, but what is that?

Smith: It’s likely that there are many kinds of uses for putative craft-items other than utilitarian use. A short list would include religious use (for example, totems and amulets), nostalgic use (for example, an item owned or made by a deceased friend or family member), commemorative or celebratory use (such as wreaths), and decorative use (such as many blown glass or ceramic items found at local ‘flea markets’). Thus, traditional quilts, of course, had the function of providing warmth but they also were decorative and often told family stories by way of patches of family clothing. We could also imagine, say, glass hammers that are not designed for utilitarian use but for decorative use. Many similar examples and uses of craft-items are possible.

Jones: Your mention of decorative use, because of its usual aesthetic connotations, leads to my own definition of art, which I’ll attempt to employ to collapse all craft-items into art-items. Briefly, I shall define art in the classificatory sense (that is, vs. non-art) as follows: Art is any artifact that is intentionally created as a candidate for aesthetic notice by way of a perceptual shift.(1) All putative craft-items are presumably artifacts in the very general sense of being made by humans. Also, I presume they are intentionally made. Thirdly, they all have some kind of low-end aesthetic properties such as line, shape, sound, texture, color, even smell and taste, that can be noticed either singly or as sensory gestalts. Low-end aesthetic properties are phenomenologically basal and should be distinguished from high-end aesthetic properties such as beauty, dynamism, mystery, expressivity, and so on. The latter properties are used by critics to evaluate and/or interpret art-items; the former I use to identify art-items simpliciter. Lastly, the idea of a perceptual shift, as discussed earlier, allows us to move the focal point of lines, shapes, colors, etc.,—noticed for their own sake—to the foreground of perception and to ignore or place in the background of perception any non-aesthetic aspects or uses of the items under observation. This is obviously similar to the shift in perception found in the duck/rabbit image, but is being used now in a more general ideational manner. My theory of art has much in common with the old Greek word aisthētikos, which referred to noticing aspects of sensory perception for their own sake.

Smith: But what about counter-examples to your definition: a) Conceptual art may indeed have material aesthetic properties but they are usually not the point; rather, the idea is crucial. How could works like John Cage’s 4′33″ or Joseph Beuys’ I Like America and America Likes Me ever count as art if we only consider formalistic aspects of them?  b) What about unintentional works of art? Are they not possible? c) Why do you say ‘candidate for aesthetic notice’ rather than ‘candidate for aesthetic appreciation’? d) Lastly, are you saying that art is in the eye of the beholder? Isn’t that too subjective?

Jones: I shall briefly attempt to address your concerns.(2) a) With conceptual pieces, formal low-end aesthetic properties function in a material way to maintain the basic artness of the item. They ‘anchor’ it. Beyond that, as the philosopher George Dickie has suggested, ideas themselves could be artifacts that have formal aesthetic properties of a mental kind that can be noticed introspectively. In the case of 4′33″ the whole setting of the piano, the blank musical sheets, the timer, the pianist turning empty sheets from time to time, and so on, was undoubtedly keenly noticed by the audience for its own sake. The very idea of such a ‘performance’ must have been at the center of their aesthetic attention as they then turned to what the piece meant or what Cage was ‘trying to say.’ Thus, as unusual as they may be, conceptual pieces are still susceptible to a perceptual shift from the non-aesthetic to the aesthetic. (Interestingly, in this same context, what if Duchamp in 1917 had ‘submitted’ Fountain as utterly ideational and not as an altered urinal?) b) I would like to claim that all artworks are intentional. If we know beyond any doubt that the original maker of an item had absolutely no aesthetic intention for it, in order to convert the item to an art-item, we would have to, as it were, ‘Duchampify’ it. That is, we would have to re-make the item in roughly the same way Duchamp re-made the famous urinal; we could title it, sign it, and alter its mode of display to a greater or lesser extent so as to bring to the fore its low-end aesthetic properties. This could all be done intentionally with the result that, even though we literally did not make the item, we converted it to an art-item. We are then the artists of the art-item, just as Duchamp did not create the urinal but he did create Fountainas an art-item. (I also want to add that many of the Dada provocations were not entirely random; they were pre-planned in certain ways, and then anyone finding the results to be artistic was intentionally using a theory of art to do so.) c) I use the terminology ‘candidate for aesthetic notice’ because it seems neutral, whereas ‘candidate for aesthetic evaluation’ seems to imply some kind of value issues-for example, good art vs. bad art-that are not germane to defining art per se. There is an obvious difference between art per se and good vs. bad art. And lastly, d) My theory of art is not Idealistic (in the philosophical sense) or subjective. The artifact must be real and it must have low-end aesthetic properties that can be noticed for their own sake. Of course, in order to finalize and make my theory work, one must know what a perceptual shift is and how to do it, but although this is a sort of mental shift, it is not entirely or even predominantly subjective in nature.

Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa (Le Radeau de La Méduse), 1819, oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre.

Smith: For the moment, I shall let your rejoinders pass. What is the upshot of your theory of art-items?

Jones: Just this: if my theory is correct, it would follow that all putative craft-items are really art-items if they satisfy the criteria of my theory. The word craft would still retain its old meaning of applied skill in making, but beyond that it would be something of a linguistic or ontological ‘dangler’; that is, it would have no important conceptual content. Perhaps surprisingly, I would like to conclude by saying, for example, that a Hummel figurine or a traditional quilt are just as much art-items as Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa. There are no evaluative assumptions presupposed in this claim, just a consistent application of my definition of art-items to all three of these objects.

Notes

1. For a fuller analysis of my theory of art, please refer to Chapter 1 in my book Beginning Aesthetics, which is freely available for downloading at Academia.edu. In that chapter, I introduce the term sentifactas a way of extending the possibility of art-making to non-human animals.

2. Again, these types of putative counter-examples to my theory are dealt with more fully in Beginning Aesthetics.

John Valentine teaches philosophy courses at the Savannah College of Art and Design. His scholarly articles have appeared in The Philosopher, The Southwest Philosophy Review, The Florida Philosophical Review, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, The Journal of Philosophical Research, and ARTPULSEmagazine. His textbook Beginning Aestheticswas published by McGraw-Hill in 2007.