The Ambiguity of Modern Craft   1      2      3      -      PRINTER VERSION

>> cational institutions, publications, professional associations and museums, has been under no pressure to explain its claim that, while modern crafts is just like painting and sculpture, it is somehow special and cannot be judged by the same criteria as painting and sculpture.

In the past 10 years, though, commercial galleries have emerged as a possible alternative to both the crafts fair/crafts shop venue and the university gallery. These galleries exhibit craft objects in the same manner fine arts galleries show painting and sculpture, and although the work they exhibit (primarily academic crafts) does not demand fine arts prices, it does sell. This new commercial venue has sparked the need for so-called "critical" analysis and has spawned new publications filled with glossy advertisements aimed at fine arts collectors who have grown weary of the bombast and high prices of post-modern painting and sculpture. Modern crafts, by adopting a strategy most marginal elements in culture resort to—that is to imitate the group from whom they seek approval—seems close to realizing its goal.

Artists, critics, curators and gallery owners in the fine arts world, however, are still not very enthusiastic about modern crafts. When confronted with this new fine arts/crafts hybrid, they inevitably complain that modern crafts seems to be nothing more than elaborate and complicated technique masquerading as artistic concept. To most of them the crafts world looks like a small, self-satisfied club, unconcerned with issues outside its own world. There is much truth to this perception. Modern crafts has always tried to have their cake and eat it too. Their continued insistence that crafts is art but that it is special and cannot be judged by fine art standards has not been supported by the kind of intellectual and aesthetic criteria that would create a context in which the unique aspects of crafts can be read and understood. This is something modern crafts seems reluctant to explore. For it would not only entail explaining why they have abandoned crafts historical language, but also mean formulating a new history and language for crafts that would be believable and hold up to critical scrutiny.

Modern crafts' present position in American culture is not unlike the painters and sculptor's predicament in the 1930s. Dore Ashton in her book The New York School noted that until World War II, for example, "...most wealthy patrons regarded the painter and sculptor as embellishments of culture, basically non-essential." In an effort to establish a viable position in culture for their work, painters and sculptors, of what became known as the New York School, aggressively pursued an intellectual dialogue with not only writers and composers, who were the predominant artists of their time, but also philosophers, critics, psychiatrists and scientists. Ashton remarks that the purpose of the legendary Club was "...to confirm their widening audience among the educated strata of the society and to establish the visual artist as a member of the intelligentsia on equal footing with writers and composers. No amount of nostalgic disclaiming can disguise the interest the visual artists displayed in attracting other intellectuals to their bailiwick, and putting them in their place, so to speak." 1

Modern crafts, on the other hand, has never fostered a climate sympathetic to the kind of intellectual discourse where the crafts' possible role and relevance in modern culture might be analyzed and debated. It has, instead, chosen to explain its ineffectual position in culture by falling back, rather passively,
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