The poet they probably shouldn’t have sent. I watch anime and am sometimes accused of reading books. I'm writing a long gay giant robot story in verse—probably this millennium's best yuri mecha epic poem, through lack of competition.


'Now praise those names on tombs of steel engraved | And toll this rotting country’s countless bells.'


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.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @thaliarchus's post:

I dunno. My best working definition of art is that it is an act of self-expression. A decent litmus test is that if you give two people the same instructions and expect their results to be the same, that is mostly craft. If you expect their results to be significantly different, then some self-expression happened somewhere, and that's art.

Discussions about craft can be more "objective," for some definition of that word. But if you want to talk about how something made you feel, that might be a discussion about art.

I am of course not going to pretend to any authority over what anyone else says or thinks, and this post is just a recommendation.

In some ways, I agree with you, in that I think the current Anglophone concept of art emerges with the birth of the European liberal-Romantic concept of the individual.

But I suppose the difference is that I think that's a problem, or that that adopting this idea of art will sooner or later cause us problems. I think it will cause us problems when we confront things that exist before or beyond the European invention of the individual, but which still summon from us the feelings which might make us want to use the word art. These things won't map onto the individual: tens of craft workers will create a full cycle of stained glass windows; generations of artisans will carve out a community's rock huts in a cliff; a communal team of musicians will improvise together something never before heard, yet rooted in well-worn traditions.

Let's grab one of the retrospective engines of the invention of the individual. Is Shakespeare's Henry VIII less art than King Lear because in writing Henry VIII he collaborated with Fletcher in ways too complex to unpick fully? The Lear/Leir story was centuries old and familiar by the time he got his hands on it. Which is where, I think, one winds up needing the idea the conventional even in order to defend the individual: to grasp the individual aspects of Shakespeare's Lear, it helps to know the conventional plot he was transmitting, and the materials from which he worked (or as we would say if he had lived more recently, ‘from which he stole’).


On objectivity and feelings, I think I'd say that I'm not very interested in a quest for the objective, which I don't think can ever be reached. Instead, I'm worried for what you might want to call, if you want a long Latinate word, intersubjectivity. My feelings are mine, and no one can contradict them, but by the same token they lack immediate relevance for anyone who isn't a close friend or a family member, and they can't be adequately communicated. If what we are to say to strangers about crafted work is ‘I had X feelings’, I'm not sure what useful response there can be beyond ‘Okay’. And that seems distressingly solipsistic.