Lee Love on fri 14 aug 09
On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 3:10 PM, steve graber wrote:
> =3DA0Steve Graber, Grab
> sounds like artists create, craftsmen produce
I am not sure if this holds. What Clark is bemoaning, is
the collapse of the cheap and easy times when people would put large
sums of money down on anything the brokers called art. The bubble
burst and art is no longer a good commodity/product. Craft just
putts along like it always has: something created by the human hand.
--
Lee Love, Minneapolis
"The tea ceremony bowl is the ceramic equivalent of a sonnet: a
small-scale, seemingly constricted form that challenges the artist to
go beyond mere technical virtuosity and find an approach that both
satisfies and transcends the conventions." -- Rob Sliberman
full essay: http://togeika.multiply.com/journal/item/273/
Randall Moody on fri 14 aug 09
On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 1:13 AM, Lee Love wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 3:10 PM, steve graber wrote:
> > Steve Graber, Grab
> > sounds like artists create, craftsmen produce
>
> I am not sure if this holds. What Clark is bemoaning, is
> the collapse of the cheap and easy times when people would put large
> sums of money down on anything the brokers called art. The bubble
> burst and art is no longer a good commodity/product. Craft just
> putts along like it always has: something created by the human hand.
>
>
Clark does say that one of the things that killed Craft was the ACC being
taken over by people who treated it as a commodity. He also noticed that
there was no reference to "craftsmen" in the literature for the Shaping the
Future of Craft conference. His main thesis is that Craft died from the
toxicity of art envy, overdosing on nostalgia. We also don't think
critically about our work according to Clark. (This is a general we not a
specific we.) To quote him: "What passes for theory, criticism and debate i=
n
craft, with a few notable exceptions, has become the most dishonest,
mindless, uninformed, meaningless, evasive and delusional activity in the
arts." --G. Clark.
Randall in Atlanta
Lee Love on fri 14 aug 09
On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 7:40 AM, Randall Moody wro=
te:
> Clark does say that one of the things that killed Craft was the ACC being
> taken over by people who treated it as a commodity.
Commodification is one of the aspects of consumer society the
Mingei movement was working against.
> Future of Craft conference. His main thesis is that Craft died from the
> toxicity of art envy, overdosing on nostalgia. We also don't think
> critically about our work according to Clark.
The main premise of Leach's Potter's Book was "toward a
standard." And the preservation of traditional work was not
nostalgic, but was to protect local culture from the encroaching
commercial global culture that was engulfing the planet. William
Morris and Okakura Tenshin worked on these issues before Leach and
Yanagi.
It is easy to put Leach's criticism of our work back in the
'50s: we were not working from the foundations of craft that had
been opened up to us because of better communications and the
scholarship of the past that was available to us. If you don't
understand where your craft came from, you do not have a strong
foundation. This is a problem Leach saw in the studio arts programs
he visited.
--
Lee Love, Minneapolis
"The tea ceremony bowl is the ceramic equivalent of a sonnet: a
small-scale, seemingly constricted form that challenges the artist to
go beyond mere technical virtuosity and find an approach that both
satisfies and transcends the conventions." -- Rob Sliberman
full essay: http://togeika.multiply.com/journal/item/273/
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