"Q: How do you define ‘craft’?
A: Craft is one of the visual arts and it is a visual art that focuses on a close and intimate relationship with materials and processes. In the simplest way, that’s really what it is. None of that definition means that it cannot be everything else, that when you work with materials you don’t bring your entire life’s biography into the work, that you have ideas that flow through it, but ultimately it is different from other fields in that it has a material and process intensity. That is also it’s problem. Because now as art is going multi-media, you can work with any material, change, shift, if there’s a store in town, a junk pile somewhere, you can drag something out of, you can migrate from one material to the other. Crafts is kind of a difficult issue for our culture today because it takes, depending upon the field, anything from seven to ten years to develop that extraordinary intimacy with materials. And the other thing which makes it different, I think, is, and this is probably a personal bias, but, craft is, to my mind, at best when it is dealing with sensuality. When it starts putting on all those little footnotes from art history, it tends to get a little more tiresome than when it just grabs you by the throat and just thrills you because of something that you see that is possibly completely abstract but has no narrative whatsoever. That’s the exciting thing that it does that, at least in today’s fine arts, you don’t experience as much."
Clark, G. "How Art Envy killed the crafts movement." Part two, Questions and Answers. Lecture at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, Portland, OR. October 16, 2008. Transciption by ABJ Seattle Glass Online, September 5, 2009. Podcast found at: http://www.museumofcontemporarycraft.org/media/2008_10_16_Garth_Clark_CraftPerspect2.mp3
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