Every so often I meet a claim about what art ought to do, or that something is or isn’t art.
I’m afraid that when I do, I wonder who loaded the dice I’ve just been handed.
English art used to mean craft. When Chaucer translates ‘ars longa, vita brevis’ to start The Parliament of Fowls, he writes ‘The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne’; he means that love (primarily) and poetry (his secondary topic) are both skills, professions. Art was concrete, practical, human work. We retain quite a lot of these associations in present-day artisan and artificial.
The word has changed since and now, when used in this way—I am of course not discussing the straightforward use of art to mean visual art—it usually makes a transcendental claim. Art forms a category of work with a special value, because it mimics the act of creation in the mind of God, or because it most especially conveys the moral values we confess, or because it emerges from the flippantly unnecessary excess of the human spirit, &c &c.
You can tell a class-interest story about this shift, if you want to: entering a world of industry, which can knock out reproductions of creative objects in previously-unimagined plenty, the newly-empowered middle class seeks new tools with which to distinguish middlebrow culture from what the poor like.
But you don’t have to want to tell that story of causation, and I’m more interested here in the consequences rather than the causes. An ongoing contest springs up, in which different mediums and bodies of work compete for the affirming label of art, without participants often raising their heads to ask why they compete in the first place. Are games art? Well, that’s a topic for another time, but art is a game, and a rigged one.
Since art rests on transcendental claims, it also blocks fruitful talk, because different people bring different transcendental claims to the table. If I think art arises from the flippantly unnecessary excess of the human spirit, and you think it mimics the act of creation in the mind of God, and we try to have a second-order conversation about art, fruitful talk will probably fall into the gap between our underlying ideas.
Craft, on the other hand, opens itself to discussion easily: here is a thing, let us talk through its contours and the work behind them. We need not agree on much else to agree that craft traditions exist, and that a person can skilfully fulfil those traditions or skilfully reject them. Art is an ever-receding aspiration, a goalpost that power has mounted on wheels; the practice of a craft is a welcoming habit that anyone can start, or start to appreciate.
Down with art. Up with craft.
