Page 79 - Constructing Craft

Social and Cultural Distinctions

After the Second World War it was evident that the Western art world continued to
rely on Collingwood’s philosophy, or variations of it, to define the emerging studio

craft movement. Craftspeople who aspired to become craft artists realised that

conceptual skills were considered more important than traditional craft skills. Grace
Cochrane, speaking about craft in Australia, noted that:

By the 1960s the visual arts avant garde had come to associate
works that had been made with skill and care with a lack of
originality. Through the structures of the art world, a value
system became entrenched in which ideas and emotions could
not be associated with sympathetic attitudes towards materials,
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or the skills and processes enjoyed in working with them.

For craftspeople, those who advocated for the crafts and critics trying to integrate
craft into the world of art, a discursive confusion developed. Cochrane believed that

this became a fundamental barrier to the advance of studio crafts.

[T]he critical or literary parts of the craft world adopted the
aspirations and language of the art world in an effort to validate
their practice. In doing so, while certainly changing and
overturning conservative perceptions about what the crafts
might be, they set in train a denial of their own social and
technological histories and values. This pattern was to remain
until the questioning of cultural art hegemonies began to occur
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in the crafts … in the 1980s.

This was part of the art and craft debate within a cultural and social framework.

In 1975, Bernard Smith appeared to reject the rigidity of Collingwood’s definition of

art when he suggested that out-of-date art theories and archaic class distinctions
were preventing the arts and crafts from becoming an integrated and integral part of

the community.
There are few professional artists and professional craftspeople
who want strongly to defend this distinction today. It is absurd
and anachronistic to insist that those who paint or sculpt or
engage in the production of graphic art be called artists while
those who work creatively in ceramics, weaving, wood and so
forth, be called craftsmen … And it is equally anachronistic,

Constructing Craft