art vs craft
Feb. 27th, 2003 10:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maribouOkay, 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.
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.
