There have been any number of attempts to distinguish between Art and Craft. A friend of mine goes further and divides craft into two with ‘high craft’ as a pinnacle akin to art. In one version of a comparison chart[1],Art is ‘unstructured and boundless’ while Craft is ‘the use of hands and brain to create tangible objects’. In another Art comes from ‘heart and soul’ while Craft comes from the ‘brain or mind’. Furthermore, Art is ‘difficult’ while Craft is ‘easy’, and Art is based on ‘ideas, feelings and visual qualities’ while Craft is the ‘right use of tools and materials’. Do any of these labels actually help? Probably not. Notions that craft is ‘easy’ would bring tears to the eyes of glassblowers and weavers while the highly prejudicial term ‘difficult’ applied to art lends itself to a view of art as romantic and only the province of the gifted genius. For mere humans Art is out of reach or at least locked in a garret somewhere, while anyone can make a lampshade.

There have always been artisans. The guilds of medieval times were the forerunners of trade unions and accounted for every trade producing household objects, clothing and religious artefacts sold at shrines. Stained glass windows and cathedrals themselves, as examples of a cut above a kitchen stool, were all built by craftsmen. There were no artists as such but a Michaelangelo, feted widely, was essentially a tradesman employed under contract to carve religious statuary and latterly as a painter of ceilings when they became fashionable. There is no doubt that he had religious conviction [heart and soul] and skill [the right use of materials]. To separate the two seems purposeless.

The industrial revolution introduced the world to machines that could reproduce cottage industry artefacts ad finitum, essentially removing any concept of the artist. Alongside however, was the 18^th century British portrait industry. Kneller, and Levy among others were flooded with commissions from the rich to have their painted image on the dining room wall. The Kit Kat series of commissions from members of the exclusive Kit Kat club were typical. The point was though that the artists couldn’t keep up and employed a production line of specialists in drapery, faux wood and costuming while they limited themselves to the face and signature. In more contemporary times foundries and metal workshops create the large scale public works of noted sculptors and no one bats an eyelid. This duality is common. To push this idea one step further, the noted minimalist Judd went out of his way to remove any trace of not just the artist’s hand but all hints of heart, soul or emotion. He was more than happy for someone else to manufacture what appears in Art books under his name. And there is of course Karl Andre taking a collection of ready-made bricks and arranging them after the example of Duchamp who claimed artistic integrity through his having chosen his ready-made industrial items. While there are people who would no doubt eschew such thinking as not art at all, the hands-off approach to materials renders them as non-craft as well. Confusing isn’t it.

One argument for separating art and craft is that Art is non-reproducable, that each work is unique. That may well be true but even those industries still working with hand-made objects, such as potteries, cannot guarantee that each hand-thrown pot is identical despite appearances.  Arranging said pots on the floor of a gallery as an installation propounding an idea of the mundanity of life could well gloss over any imperfections in their manufacture in the quest for meaning. Given that the heart as an organ, evolved to pump blood around the organism, plays no part in the process and the soul is a problematic invention by the church to separate humankind from the animal world, we come back to one and half kilos of grey matter and 68 billion neurons working away creating connections. Those sections of the brain generating an intellectual response [heart and soul] and those controlling hand-eye coordination [the proper use of materials] work in coordination. Whatever innate motivation or compulsion there is behind the need to create and manipulate materials, there is evidence of it going back to the earliest incarnations of humanity. While we recognise that some human beings are better at it than others due to unspecified neural connections, the Art and the Craft are part of the same process.

The art market is flourishing. People, corporations and governments are paying enormous sums of money to own Art. There is both an immediacy and a sense of longevity to all of this Galleries purchase and hang what they consider to be prominent examples of a living culture which may in time become more than historical markers and achieve loftier heights. While that immediacy seems to be increasingly important so too is the hope that such art will last. The attempts to keep Blue Poles on the canvas by the staff of the National Gallery in Canberra is an annual ritual as is the preservation of any art created from perishable or inferior materials or indeed materials with not just a limited shelf-life but built-in obsolescence.  A lack of lightfast pigment, supports that rot, or even varnish darkening over time to the point of obliterating the pigment beneath, are all common ailments let alone contemporary pollution eating away at precious marble. The level of Craft required to ensure the longevity of materials and the resultant Art in some ways precedes whatever emotional response is taking place. Just how much of the work being sold around the world will not last the journey simply because the artist lacked the technical skill or understanding of materials to ensure that it won’t fall apart within the lifetime of the buyer? To separate the vision from the skills seems counter-productive.

All of humankind feels the need to create. Whether it is a building-sized sculpture, an easel painting or simply choosing the right combination of colour, shapes and textures to outfit a room, it is all art. According to Duchamp [and who could challenge it now?] there is no need to make anything when you can appropriate and repurpose. So, where does Art begin and end and when does it become Craft? To use the definition that Art is unstructured,  boundless,  and based upon ideas and emotions may well be true, but even those artists using what may be considered as craft techniques are applying choice and sensibility which may or may not be unstructured or boundless. Unstructured Art and Craft simply doesn’t exist.

[1] https://keydifferences.com/difference-between-art-and-craft.html