Edmund de Waal and Julian Stair 1 2 3 4 5 - PRINTER VERSION
>> JS: I certainly don't want to create the impression that I am optimistic. I am less pessimistic or negative than I was about 10 or 12 years ago, but I still have this overlying sense of concern, if not outright irritation at the lack of any sort of substantial critical examination of the issues that affect us. I agree with Edmund that the main issue is that crafts cannot carry on in the same way it has. Whether you are a vessel maker, a sculptor or a potter, process and materials are not enough to justify and explain your work. Crafts has to define its position in relationship to the other arts, as a critical movement.
RB: I think most of us grew up in the crafts being told that you shouldn't make value judgments about other people's work and yet privately we make judgments all the time. The process of making judgments is how knowledge progresses. Do you think that that is a particular problem for the crafts?
EDW: Criticism doesn't really exist in the crafts because no one is really prepared to critique anyone else's work, (A) because it is bad manners after all and (B) there is this sense that one is somehow letting the side down. So after 70 years of this, if you write a negative review of someone's work, there is a feeling that you are showing up all of ceramics. The value of judgments is that it is a hardening process. It is also refining process that in the long run helps everyone.
RB: Its a dialectic, it isn't someone squashing someone else for your own benefit. Its part of a discourse that must be maintained if there is going to be progress in a field.
EdW: Exactly.
JS: Craft criticism hasn't been at a very interesting level for a long time, though in recent years it has become a bit more rigorous. But it has tended to be dominated by a very small number of individuals who for the most part are professional writers. There are a very few makers who are starting to write as well, but there is this dilemma that Edmund mentioned of criticizing fellow makers. I even found myself arguing with the editor of Crafts magazine that it puts the maker in an onerous position to criticize other work when you are also exhibiting work yourself. Then I realized, while listening to a program on literary criticism one day, that it has been a tradition in Britain that reviews of first novels are always written by established novelists. It is not seen as a conflict of interest that by being critical of someone else's work they are either promoting their own particular view or elevating their own work by contrast. So I am eating my words of a few months ago and saying that yes, I think that we have to put ourselves on the line more than we do.
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© 1980 - 2025 Rob Barnard . All Rights Reserved. Site design: eismontdesign
>> JS: I certainly don't want to create the impression that I am optimistic. I am less pessimistic or negative than I was about 10 or 12 years ago, but I still have this overlying sense of concern, if not outright irritation at the lack of any sort of substantial critical examination of the issues that affect us. I agree with Edmund that the main issue is that crafts cannot carry on in the same way it has. Whether you are a vessel maker, a sculptor or a potter, process and materials are not enough to justify and explain your work. Crafts has to define its position in relationship to the other arts, as a critical movement.
RB: I think most of us grew up in the crafts being told that you shouldn't make value judgments about other people's work and yet privately we make judgments all the time. The process of making judgments is how knowledge progresses. Do you think that that is a particular problem for the crafts?
EDW: Criticism doesn't really exist in the crafts because no one is really prepared to critique anyone else's work, (A) because it is bad manners after all and (B) there is this sense that one is somehow letting the side down. So after 70 years of this, if you write a negative review of someone's work, there is a feeling that you are showing up all of ceramics. The value of judgments is that it is a hardening process. It is also refining process that in the long run helps everyone.
RB: Its a dialectic, it isn't someone squashing someone else for your own benefit. Its part of a discourse that must be maintained if there is going to be progress in a field.
EdW: Exactly.
JS: Craft criticism hasn't been at a very interesting level for a long time, though in recent years it has become a bit more rigorous. But it has tended to be dominated by a very small number of individuals who for the most part are professional writers. There are a very few makers who are starting to write as well, but there is this dilemma that Edmund mentioned of criticizing fellow makers. I even found myself arguing with the editor of Crafts magazine that it puts the maker in an onerous position to criticize other work when you are also exhibiting work yourself. Then I realized, while listening to a program on literary criticism one day, that it has been a tradition in Britain that reviews of first novels are always written by established novelists. It is not seen as a conflict of interest that by being critical of someone else's work they are either promoting their own particular view or elevating their own work by contrast. So I am eating my words of a few months ago and saying that yes, I think that we have to put ourselves on the line more than we do.
<<
© 1980 - 2025 Rob Barnard . All Rights Reserved. Site design: eismontdesign