Soetsu Yanagi, c.1955
Crafts or more precisely what we refer to as Folk Crafts are activities that link us to our ancestors going back millions of years. The making of useful things is a survival skill that is in our nature. The role of the individual artist or artist-craftsman are relatively modern inventions since around the time of the Renaissance. During the Twentieth century, Art critic Soetsu Yanagi codified the characteristics that were common to craft through the ages and emphasized the importance and purity of folk crafts in The Unknown Craftsman as work that had these qualities:
•Useful
•Unselfconsciously hand made
•Unsigned
•By the Many (in quantity)
•For the Many (affordable)
Based on these simple criteria, you can see that a teapot or a chair could be categorized as Craft or Art depending on how it is executed.
These simple ideas seem to be completely foreign to persons and organizations that promote themselves as champions of craft today. Craft schools, craft museums and the American Craft Council itself all promote individuals and work that are consistent with few or none of the Laws of Craftsmanship. How can these organizations be expected to promote ideas they don’t understand or even acknowledge themselves? Blind to the importance of craft, each actively blurs the line between Art and Craft in an effort to elevate the “artist” their “art” and their institution. The meaning and nature of craft are obscured and diluted beyond recognition.
How many things made today can be said to satisfy the laws of craftsmanship? Has craft disappeared from America? While our collective understanding of craft is lacking, I believe that craft itself will never leave us. It is alive but hiding in the humble corners of our economy. Can you see it?