The Distinction between Art and Craft

Abstract

We have become quite comfortable in the past century with the phrase and crafts.' We use to refer, for example, to the products and practices of painting, sculpture, and printmaking and to those of ceramics, weaving, and woodand metalwork. We also assume that the arts and the crafts are similar in important ways (or else why would we routinely group them together?) but also somehow different (or else why would we need two terms?). To get clear about these similarities and differences, though, is another story. Part of the problem is that has a positive evaluative connotation that lacks. Some critics, with good reason, claim that this difference in evaluative meaning reflects our culture's elitist values: what white European men make is dignified by the label while what everyone else makes counts only as craft. This sort of charge has become familiar by now; it underlies, for example, the recent claim that our literary canon is unfairly biased toward the works of white men. And although literature departments have been the primary targets of such criticism, art history and fine arts programs, no doubt, are next in line. But while it may be important to expand both literary and visual canons to include the works of neglected groups, we must also investigate the values, categories, or distinctions we use to justify such works' exclusion in the first place. Examining the distinction between art and craft is one place to start. For once classified as craft, a work has trouble counting not only as great art, but as any sort of art at all. Those who are suspicious of the art-craft distinction sometimes imply that this exclusion is arbitrary, resting on nothing but elitism; on this view, the only real distinction to be made may well be the one between the social status of those who become artists and those who