Garth Clark's 2008 lecture "How Art Envy Killed the Craft's Movement"

“For most of the modern crafts movement’s 150 year life it has dealt with a debilitating condition: an unhappy contentious relationship with the fine arts. In 1939 Fortune Magazine ran a survey of ceramics, in America, and titled it “The Art with the Inferiority Complex.” That was equally true then as it is now of craft across the board. Craft has variously ebbed and flowed, moving between resentment of the art and envy. This relationship grew increasingly acrimonious as art moved away from craft-based values in the mid-century and closer to conceptualism and the dematerialization of the art object. The roots of craft’s art envy art long and they are complex. They arrive from the moment of birth when it was named the Arts and Crafts Movement. The title was determined by class, craftsmen in Victorian England were mostly rural and lower working class; the members of the Arts and Crafts Movement were middle and upper class. So they needed something that said, “better than just craft”—hence the word Arts. Right there the strange and unhappy dance between art and craft begins. Over the decades this grew from an annoying neurosis into a full blown pathological obsession that ultimately in the late 20^th century killed the movement. The Arts and Crafts Movement in the second half of the 19^th century was a major player in Victorian and Edwardian life. The movement was founded to save the values of craftsmanship from being destroyed by an impersonal machine age. It was immensely influential and controversial. It was widely parried in literature and theater, but it was also effective and enjoyed a high profile. Intellectual giants roamed its stage. John Ruskin, William Morris, Augustus Wilby Pugin and Oscar Wilde. Its adherents included Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Comfort Tiffany. It had a major influence on fashion and decoration in its day, inspired developments in modern architecture and some of its theory can be found in the ideological foundations of the modernist movement itself. There was also something curiously dilettante and academic about the movement. Most of its practioners then did not make anything by their own hand. They were white-collar crafters, and if you don’t mind I will use the word crafters rather than craftsperson and craftspeople which is sort of linguistically repugnant in a way, it’s such a cold, PC term.

They designed on paper, explored the science of their craft, they were mostly privileged, had private incomes, and were well educated. The actual labor was performed by skilled, anonymous workers often listed without respect in the studio ledgers as ‘laborers’. So there was something not quite authentic about these new crafters…

In the next stage, studio craft from the late 1918 onwards corrected this as individuals became responsible for the making as well as the designing.

[…] Craft between the two world wars also suffered a severe setback. Modernism, despite having been influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement, threw the crafts overboard. They _____ the crafts movement as serving a regressive bourgeoisie taste, partly true, and argued that hand manufacture was inefficient and a costly form of production that could only lead to precious objects. This did not serve the needs of the proletariat. Socialism was the ruling ideology of this time, and it was kind of ironic since the crafts movement was amongst the pioneers of socialism in the previous century. Industry, they decided, created inexpensive, well-designed products for everyone. In some ways this argument was exaggerated, but William Morris might well have agreed. Towards the end of his career, he bemoaned the fact that he had been reduced to making bibilos for the rich.

The impact of this was to cut craft off from the vitality of modernism in the 1920s and the 1930s. Without modernism’s search for the new to influence them, craft, born as a revival movement to begin with, exaggerated this role and much of the energy of that time was given to the reproducing of old techniques and aesthetics.

So the movement, resentful of being pushed into the margins, became increasingly anachronistic, hermetic, and anti-art. They spoke resentfully against art as being decadent, ego-driven, and lacking the supposed moral authority of making objects by hand for use. Others less involved in functionalism simply made fashionable, decorative wares in the romantic Art Deco style. So when one surveys the growth of modernism at that time, the role of crafts is slight.

After 1946 this begins to change. The American craft movement, the deceased subject of this talk. Entered a period of astounding growth and brilliance. Due to the GI Bill, education became popular, and universities across the country began to open departments to cater to this demand. Craft courses were enormously popular and spread rapidly. By 1975 nearly 300 institutions of higher education offered courses, MFAs and BFAs in the crafts.

Around the same time craft’s marketplace began to explode. And a strong, three-tiered structure emerged. At the lower end was the craft fair, the most populous level. In the middle was a hybrid, a craft shop and gallery, which provided a bridge to the top end, true galleries that were modeled on the fine arts style.

Prices quickly soared after 1980 from hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands to eventually even hundreds of thousands. The collector base, once tiny, was growing in leaps and bounds, and the new collectors were affluent.

The field was represented by an active powerful New York based organization, The American Crafts Council. It published a respected magazine, Craft Horizons; ran the Museum of Contemporary Craft in New York and a thriving craft shop, American House, in the city; organized national and regional conferences, touring exhibitions; arranged fairs; and generally promoted the field.

[…] While craft was doing well, fine art was doing better. It was much more glamorous, had better museums and institutions, and of course a much better rewards program. Envy was fueled by resentment that while craft was successful, was not as respected nor as valued as the fine arts. This resentment was justifiable at least by one subgenre with the crafts--those who were not crafters: Robert Arneson, Ron Nagle, and others who were trapped because of the material a parted by the instituted by the modernist regime. (?) Certain activities such as ceramics were considered de facto crafts by the arts no matter whether the maker was producing art or not. For these few artists the insistence that they be taken seriously as fine artists was just. For the rest of the crafters who climbed aboard this bandwagon, it was wishful thinking, and they were embarking on a quixotic journey that was going to end very badly and in their rejection. They too wanted to cross over as had Ken Price and others, so they loaded their crafts with footnotes from Jansen’s History of Art and festooned it with quotes from Michel Foucault.

The result was that craft was strongly and sometimes pretentiously influenced by art but it did not in the process become fine art.

The result of this desire to escape craft had, by the beginning of the 21^st century, left the movement in tatters: Craft had lost its flagship museum, it’s council had been moribund for over a decade, it’s market had fallen apart; education was shrinking and failing to produce young crafters (rather it was graduating multi-media sculptors); craft was completely overshadowed by design; and today is a less influential part of the visual arts than ever before.

[…] More than any other single factor [art envy] poisoned the movement and brought about its demise.

[...] We dealt in ceramics. Some of what we exhibited was unquestionably craft and we identified it as such. But we also exhibited […] others, that was also unquestionably fine art. This meant that we worked both sides of the art craft divide. We showed art on the SOFA art fairs as well as the blue chip art fair, the art show that was organized by the exclusive American Art Dealers Association, of which we were members. So we were privy to the backroom arguments and the gossip of both.

From 1980 on, the argument that craft was really art was ubiquitous, fevered, and relentless. The failure of craft was blamed on fine arts elitism. But rarely did one hear the argument that the simple truth was was that it was just because craft was different. The argument was drawn b two relatively small groups within the crafts, some of the leading artists and the collectors, but even though they were a small minority they were he most vocal and persistent voices in contemporary craft. It would be nice to say that they were all motivated by a desire to upgrade the entire art group and some were, but it is not completely true. Bubris in both cases was the motivation, and far from wanting to improve the crafts, the real goal was to escape the field and let those left behind survive as best they could. And what it finally did was to lead craft into a bloody war against itself.

The ACC’s Museum of Contemporary Crafts was the major battlefield. And what happened there is the most instructive case study but bare in mind at the same time on a smaller level, a hundred similar battles were taking place across America.

It began in earnest in the late 1970s when the council was first forced to look for patrons. Until then the New England blue stocking Mrs. Eileen Osbourne Vanderbilt Webb (sp?) […] had generously funded the organization […] when she ran out of funds [they] turned to collectors, the only pool of affluence in the craft world.

These were the new collectors […] Some, not all, saw craft as a property that could be gentrified, upgraded into art with a resultant increase in value, prestige and giving heightened stature to them as cultural czars without paying the same high entrance fee as in the fine arts.

I know this sounds very cynical, but I was there, and there is more truth in this statement than not.

They joined the board of the ACC and slowly took control. First they imposed a corporate style makeover. Craft Horizons was named American Craft, the Museum of Contemporary Craft […] became the American Craft Museum. It all looked so logical on paper. But at the price of creating a rather bland institutional character.

It was soon apparent that the collectors were less interested in the council than in its museum, this was the prize right in the middle of New York City and right opposite the Museum of Modern Art. They decided to build a new museum […] It opened in 1986, and remained impressive if one remained outside looking at the two-storey glass façade. But the interior was dominated by a vast entrance three stories deep with a large […] staircase that we named the Staircase to Nowhere because it led to tiny claustrophobic galleries. The staff was housed in a dank windowless basement, there was no coat check (which is essential in a New York public space) and bizarrely they decided there would be no gift shop, even though the council, burdened by the construction costs was in a perilous financial state. […] But it had a certain superficial glamour, and now that they had a temple for their collections the collectors no longer needed the council. […] Craft, the kind that was made by the bulk of the council’s membership was of no interest to them; indeed it was an embarrassment, a reminder of craft’s peasant roots. They were interested in craft that looked like art. And in their minds, given a rather primitive understanding of art, they thought it was art. So they council had to go and the museum sued for divorce.

In 1990 after a particularly vicious and acrimonious separation they parted company. The council moved to Soho but never seemed to recover from the bruising fight. […] It became largely dormant except for it’s two for profit enterprises, the magazine and the craft fairs.

[…] In 2002 it became the Museum of Arts and Design which gave them their curiously beloved acronym MAD. The Times recently took them to task for perhaps taking it too seriously. The palace had finally defeated the cottage and craft officially became the art that dare not speak its name.

None of this of course turned craft into art. The more vigorously the museum argued that craft was art delivered with Palin-esque bluster: […] “I understand art because I can see an art collection in the apartment across the street from me.” As they did this the more the exposed the ignorance of the latter. The art world saw this and talked of them as barbarians at the gate and they kept it tightly locked so the crafts could not enter. Felipe de Montebello, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum, gave them a name ‘The Homeless Ones’. […] Behind the scenes the museum was becoming the laughing stock of New York’s art world. At the end of this war that craft waged against itself, the field was in shambles.

[…] The marketplace was slipping. Crafts identity was now thoroughly confused and compromised; it was almost impossible to write honestly about a field while it pretended to be something else. And the field lost credibility, direction, and purpose. And also lost what had always been one of its most sterling qualities, authenticity.

The art craft gambit had failed and the (?) set in. Apologists will tell you that the result of these efforts was that craft is now more accepted in the fine arts. This is not true. Craft is no more accepted today than decades before. What has changed is that craft materials, processes, and contexts can now be used in fine art. And that an artist working in these materials will not automatically be rejected.

But this was the result of the liberalizing impact of post-modernism and its promiscuous approach to means, not to the influence of contemporary crafts.

The fight resulted in strangely distorted values. Craft became the only community outside the penitentiary to give its greatest respect to escapees. Ken Price, Ron Nagle, Betty woodman, June Kinika (sp?), Richard Devore, are the fields most admired players; what they all have in common is that they got away and they joined the fine arts. This became the ultimate goal causing craft to be viewed as a kind of purgatory in which weavers, potters, metal smiths, glassblowers, and jewelers all waited impatiently to be promoted to [?]. Eventually wearied by this artificial and self-loathing thankless mission, craft slowly weakened and it died.

I would place the time of death around 1995. Of course craft itself continued but the venerable old movement, with its desire to establish high craft as the peer of art, was now clearly deceased. All its vital organs, that is, it’s institutions, have failed or are failing and it had been reduced to the outer margins of American culture. Compared to the current developments in art and design, craft is more marginalized and more irrelevant than it has ever been. And I don’t say any of these things with pleasure, indeed exactly the opposite.

And if there was any doubt […] that was removed when the American Crafts Council threw a wake. It was not intentional of course but it ended up serving that purpose anyway. It was a leadership conference, presumptuously entitled, “Shaping the Future of Craft.” […] The event was reminiscent of a 1989 film, the sleeper hit, called “Weekend At Bernie’s”: […] Occasionally craft’s limp hand was waved in the air to simulate life, but for the rest of it the conference studiously avoided the fact that there was a cadaver in the room. There were only two moments of reality. The first was when Martin Puryear gave his keynote address. He’d been asked to discuss that hoary old subject The Difference Between Art and Craft. […] Puryear made it clear that he did not see any connection between the two, even though he used wood with exceptional skill and eloquence, this did not give him any connection to craft and furthermore, quote, “You can make great art, without great craft, but you cannot make great craft without great skill.” In other words, craft really is about craft. Well, that did not go down very well.

[…] In theory the conference was supposed to deal with three themes: criticism and scholarship, museums, and new artists. They were hardly the most important issues facing the field but either way only one of them, new artists, ever got any attention. Every one of the panelists […] vied to present their picks of the week; bright young things making bright young things. It had a certain appeal at first but as it continued it became more repetitive and tiresome. Also it became clear that virtually none of these new artists, the terms- by the way- crafter, craftsman, craftsperson appeared to have been banned from the proceedings and those terms did not even appear in the ACCs conference literature.

It seemed that these new artists were not destined to live in the world of crafts. This was great for design and sculpture where they were clearly destined but what did this say about craft?

[…] The experience was like being trapped for 48 hours between the cover of a wallpaper magazine, which, by the way, was where most of the bright things belonged.

[…] If one had taken all the under 40s, they would not have filled the first two rows of the Hilton Hotel’s rather chilly auditorium. In part this was the result of a curiously hermetic policy of attendance by invitation only but it also did reflect the aging of the crafts and its failure to renew.

[…] It also confirmed that what passes as theory, criticism, and debate in craft […] has, with a few notable exceptions, become the most dishonest, mindless, uninformed, meaningless, evasive, and delusional activity in the arts.

[…] Craft has been overdosing on nostalgia, the equivalent of sugar in art. This is craft’s Achilles heel. It’s understandable in a way, Craft was born as a revivalist movement and revivalist movements are powered by nostalgia, not unlike, say, a historic house museum. Some nostalgia is unavoidable in craft. Used with restraint it can add charm and a rich connection to the past. But when it is overdone it turns into syrupy sentimentality, which is why there is so much cloying whimsy and saccharine cuteness in the crafts.

Being hooked on nostalgia also seems to have stunted crafts ability to engage in contemporary aesthetics. Craft aesthetics have become more regressive an anachronistic in the 21^st century. Audiences are complaining about this now and this goes from galleries through to the crafts fairs, of the same old same old romantic crafts aesthetic. Buyers are looking for a fresher younger voice that speaks of the moment and craft for the time being seems incapable of delivering.

[…] An excess of academic influence. And I know I’m in an art school and I shouldn’t say that but […]

Indeed craft [...] may be the most academically dependent activity in the arts. At the ACC conference, all the featured speakers were from academia in one form or another. There was a token collector, a token dealer (although he was also a maker and a teacher), and a token crafter (although he made most of his income administering a design and art workshop in Kansas City), that means that not once, during the entire conference seeking to shape 21^st century craft, did a single, full-time, self-identifying crafter stand on that stage. […] The shaping of the future was going to be done by academics.

When I questioned one of the trustees about the submissions, she replied, “Just as well. Those people are not part of the event because they are always trying to take control. ”

[…]

I asked [the ACC] what was its role. “Educating people about the kind of craft we like to collect” was the startling answer.

[…]

For decades the pattern in craft was to have a close friend and fellow crafter write one’s review; crafters have written most of the books and curated the bulk of the exhibitions, organized the conferences… very little light was shone on craft from without much to its detriment.

[…] Craft has a twin, from whom it was separated at birth, and that twin, the same age, involved in the same issues of function and decoration, has never been healthier more potent, or more relevant. Both came out of […] The Great Exhibition in London in 1851. […] This exhibition raised considerable clamor about the poor standard of design in industry. While craft made the decision to fight against industry, its twin, the applied arts, took a more pragmatic view of the situation and realizing that industry was going to triumph no matter what chose to fight from within. This produced the first generation of industrial designers, and while their means were different at the end what they were doing was identical-devising gracious, intelligent objects for the home.

In the early 20^th century, applied art took on a new name; modern design and it formed a close, interworking relationship with both modern art and architecture without compromising any of its own identity or independence. From the outsets in the 1930s design was shown at the Museum of Modern Art, craft was not. […] Design suffered less from ‘hardened arteries’ because it was not as intimately connected to the university system. Design had to live in the capitalist world where the tolerance for academic posturing was slight. Except when design deliberately chooses to make a link to nostalgia, the new Volkswagen Bug is a good example; design is largely driven by a desire to be new, inventive and flexible, constantly adjusting to the desires of its audience and their changes in lifestyle.

Art envy was not a problem, although there are signs that design might be showing early stages of that malaise now. Design, as long as it kept its own identity, was a welcome member of the art club, so it had nothing to prove. Today art galleries are increasingly including design in the exhibition programs. Recently the Gagosian Gallery held an exhibition of Mark Newson’s furniture. Newson is Britain’s greatest design start. What I found impressive, aside from the fact that this four week exhibition grossed 50 million dollars in sales, is that when Larry Gagosian was interviewed about the event, asked, “Is design the new art?” he said blankly that design did not need art to give it veracity. Wouldn’t it be nice if that was how we approached the crafts? This kind of money was not made by selling mass-produced furniture, ceramics, or Newsons’ very distinctive sneakers. For the exhibition Newsome offered limited edition craft from solid blocks of marble (I really hated it, between you and I, but that’s another story.) These sold from $350,000 to $750,000 each. And recently a limited edition chaise of his sold at auction for $1.4 million. You will find examples of the same idea, limited edition works by major designers, and in this case Holland’s genius Marcel Wanders, at the Manufactured Show at the MCA. This now intrudes from design into a market of higher priced hand made furniture that was once the sole purview of crafters like Wendell Castle. So design, without intent of doing harm, as we are really barely on their radar, is undermining the craft market at every level. It can produce handsome ceramics, fabrics, and jewelry, at low cost. It can produce work that to the average eye seems handcrafted and machines can now produce objects where every piece is to some extent unique, and with its limited edition they’ve entered the high craft market as well. On the other hand in the fine arts they’re working now more frequently with craft materials, so if you want a sculpture in glass, wood, ceramics, or fiber, one can get it from an art gallery with the added advantage that it carries the imprimatur of an internationally known artist. In theory this makes it if not a secure investment, at least a safer expenditure. This pincer movement from both the fine arts and design, while not have happened, as design demonstrates. Imitating art was not the route to success. Standing firm, defending craft for its many virtues would have given the movement a much longer life.

What the comparison with design also proves is that crafts slowing market cannot be blamed, at least not for the past ten years, on general economic conditions. At the same time that Americans had been spending unprecedented amounts on home furnishings, decorations, and art, the interest in craft has declined, at least in the marketplace. This is very sobering.

[…] What about the future that ACC wanted to shape? First, please do not try and bring the movement back. It will be about as much fun and probably about as pretty as the craft version of “Night of the Living Dead.” Its demise actually presents a wonderful opportunity to rethink craft; and the rot of death is, after all, the food for new life. Andrew Fulcronshon the new director for the ACC, smart, knowledgeable and pragmatic, has an opportunity on his hands. How can he give craft and for that matter, his council, a new life? It depends very much upon what he decides to jettison from the past and what he decides to keep. Well, here is a short list of suggestions: Let go of New York, the ACC should move to a smaller city where craft can have a higher profile and not have to live like a struggling shade plant beneath Manhattan’s design, fashion, and fine art monoliths. Choose a city that has a long history in modern craft, a thriving creative and youth culture, has a museum that has the word craft still in it, a population of about 500,000, and whose name begins with “P”. Deal with two issues. One is to find a new viable model for the crafts studio, which is really not working anymore. And the other, enter craft into the 21^st century aesthetically speaking. Post a definition of craft that is accurate and unambiguous. Only accept members that are self-identifying. Create a place for traditional […] classical craft which is not that contemporary, yet present it in a way that gives it respect and value because it adds that to our culture. Forge an alliance with design. This is the winning marriage, not the happy stalking of the fine arts.

Craft is too small today, and its institutions too diminished to survive on their own in the cultural food chain. Craft today, is really, a branch of design. The Dutch noted this some time ago. Some of their best crafters, for instance the jeweler Hes Barker (sp?) […] lives now with a foot planted, and rather profitably planted, in both worlds. The Dutch also came up with a great new word for craft […] they called it free design. Meaning that the crafter is released from the demands of industrial production. A free designer can make one of a kind works in series, change ideas at a moment; they are not bothered by the structure and demands of industry. Making a partnership between design and craft will take craft into a much more sophisticated, urbane world. And out of the Little House on the Prairie, rustic bias, which seems to rule the field. It will also move the eyes further apart. (That’s a reference to incest by the way.) […]

This is a perfect fit as Ben Williams recently proved. He used to run the contemporary ceramics auctions at Bonhams in London. Then he joined Philips du Pury and decided to merge ceramics within Philips superb and scholarly design auctions. It was a seamless fit […] both machine and hand living in harmony. And it made a point…context is everything. Had Williams done the same thing with ceramics and fine art the result would have been a very awkward stand off. And as for fine art and craft, if you feel you belong in the former, please leave. There is no point in telling craft that you are really a fine artist, particularly if you are accepting rare and precious craft funds in the process. Leave and prove yourself in the arena in which you think you belong. And if you fail, and if you become a born again crafter again, you can always return.

There is another option; recently an applied art movement has begun in Europe. They’ve taken this movement, which actually museum curators loathe for some reason and that is why they like the word, it is sort of like ‘queer theory’, taking things which are negative and making them positive. It’s a mix of art and design and has many ex-crafters involved. The aesthetics is industrial and these artists like Marix Esuly (sp?) in Poland, Barnaby Boffett (sp?) in England, deal with transformation of domestic objects, taking their familiarity and placing them in another universe. Some of these mutant housewives, which is my playful name for them, make both art and design. […] And this is not another world of art envy, the applied artists are confident, non-hierarchical, and they have been mining a seam that is also being explored simultaneously in the fine arts by artists like Timothy Horn with his jewelry on steroids, Cornelia Parker’s steamrolled silver tea service, and Ai Weiwei’s Demolition Derbys’ destroying treasured stone furniture and actual stone age parts that are 7,000 years old.

[…] The fine arts has a partner. I say this not unkindly, but pragmatically; it is time to let the old crafts movement go. There is so much useless baggage attached to this old veteran of the culture wars, that schlepping it along will only stop crafts from the 20^th century I do not mean this disrespectfully. I don’t mean for it to be tossed on the scrap heap with the rest of the century’s cultural detritus. This talk has been specifically about the damage of art envy. So it has in it’s own way cast craft in rather a negative light. But it applies only to the ideology, not to the individual craftsman, not toward what was being made—much of that is remarkable, universal, masterful. And the period from 1946 to 1980 is a particularly golden moment. Think of the best work of Peter Voulkos, Wendell Castle, Albert Paley, Dale Chihuly, and many others. And you know that I will only vouch for their pre-1980 work. After that, art envy brought about some ghastly art wannabe objects into their oeuvre. This period was one of extraordinary inventiveness, deep conviction, and material magic that will only become more and more revered in America’s visual arts history. And it is unquestionably art, but it is craft art. But this will only happen if the craft community assumes its duty to complete the scholarship around this period. The continued legacy of these artists rests on how well we do that job. The fine arts won’t do it for us, nor will design. It is a sacred trust for our field. And some progress is being made; Janet Koplos and Bruce Metcalf recently completed the first college textbook on the history of modern craft destined for the art history departments. New writers are emerging whose views are fresher, smarter, and unburdened by the past. Glenn Adamson is a standout and in his book, Thinking Through Craft, he provides a wonderfully sly and healing vision of this field.

So there is life after death. It can be a great stage, but only if craft is confident and easy in its own skin. As a warning of past failings, I quote from the greatest and most controversial of American art critics and theorists, Clement Greenberg. And he made a remark that I think should be etched in stone and placed in every craft institution. We were fortunate enough to snag him as the keynote speaker for the Ceramic Art Foundation’s 1^st International Conference in 1979. Surprisingly he did considerable research for his talk and at the event said to the assembled delegates, ‘You strike me as a group that is more concerned with opinion than achievement.’ If we can reverse those priorities, craft will be just fine. Craft is dead, long live the crafts. Thank you very much."

Clark, G. "How Envy Killed the Crafts Movement: An Autospsy in Two Parts." October 2008. Past CraftPerspectives Lectures at the Museum of Contemporary Craft. Portland, OR. Accessed August 29, 2009. Transcribed and abridged by ABJ Seattle Glass Online--lots of spelling errors, sorry. http://www.museumofcontemporarycraft.org/media/2008_10_16_Garth_Clark_Craftperspect1.mp3