art vs craft

[maribou]

Okay, there's a couple of posts I've made recently elsewhere that I've decided are actually pretty darn relevant to me; hence, duplication of content (oh, woe). They might even qualify as self-epiphanies. This one does, the other one... well, I'll think about that later.

For me, art is about taking risks with what's being made. So the utterly gorgeous cross-stitch I spent three years upon isn't art, and the sturdy reliable bookcase i'm eventually going to make (when we have room for such, which means when we have a house) won't be art. Neither of those two things require anything from me I can't do, and do well, and if they *did*, well, I could learn how to do it pretty easily, or just concentrate a little harder for that part.
Art, on the other hand, feels like jumping into the deep end of a pool when you aren't sure you can swim. So the livejournal icon i spent all of 5 minutes designing the other day was art, albeit not particularly good art in my opinion. If I made a cross-stitch from scratch, no pattern, and just let it take me where it went - yeah, that'd be art too.
Because if I already know where it's going when I start, and what I make is almost exclusively the expression of that initial impulse - that's just craft. Art has to have surprised me in the course of making it.

Of course, I don't really mean "just" craft. I'm a lot more pleased with the cross-stitch than I am with the livejournal icon, and I tend to value craft more than art in general, because risk-taking often leads to... well... things that are lame. But I definitely do make the distinction.

Comments

[wendevious.livejournal.com]

I like that distinction. I read this post and nodded, thinking about why Picasso's later work is more highly regarded than his early, realistic work. Definitely riskier.

But then I started thinking--if a person is very talented and consistently produces admirable work from scratch, does that mean that their easily made stuff is less art than something a semi-talented artist agonized over and took wild risks with?

[maribou]

Well, I'm not sure it has to involve *huge* risks. But in the hypothetical case where an artist sat down to say, illustrate a cookbook, and there was *no* point at which they bit their lip and felt some dramatic tension as to how what they were about to try would work out ... then yeah, it's not art, in my opinion. And if they wanna call themselves an *artist*, as opposed to a *tradesperson* (and nothing wrong with the latter), they had best be spending at least part of their time doing stuff that requires them to jump a bit, and not just walk cheerfully along.

But that's probably just 'cause I'm all about the dramatic tension, rather than being a good universal definition.