Marilyn,
I'm not Bob, but your question is a good one and it got me to thinking. It is "food for thought" and probably has no definitive answer.
Does the difference between art and craft "lie in the eye of the beholder"?
I am 68 and all my life I have been involved in the arts and the crafts. I was an Art Major in college. I spent one memorable summer in Maine at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. I then went on to study commercial photography at the Art Center College of Design in LA. This is my viewpoint on the difference between art and craft.
Art is painting, drawing, sculpture, and sometimes photography. The function of art is to please the mind.
A craft is the manufacture of a product that has some sort of utilitarian nature attached to it. Woodworking, weaving, glass blowing, ceramics, most photography for pay, etc are crafts.
The problem of definition between art and craft, be it a pleasurable one, is that a skilled craft person's work can transcend being just a utilitarian object and can be so pleasing to the eye that it becomes art.
As an example - photography- if you make pictures of ribbon cutting ceremonies or portraits or factories for annual reports, your photography is a craft. The subject matter is such that your photography is just a craft. Ansel Adams used to take such photographs. As such he was a skilled craftsman. However, as a landscape photographer he transcended from a skilled craftsman to an artist.
His factory photographs had a function. They were published in annual reports and trade magazines. He was paid for this work as a craftsman. His magnificent landscapes really had no function other than to please the eye and reveal the glory of nature. His unique interpretations of what he saw and felt and his superb photographic skills made him an artist. He was paid for his well-known landscapes as an artist. At least I hope he was.
So my own viewpoint on the difference between art and craft is rather cut and dried, but I will always think of a coffee table by George Nakashima or a weaving by Jack Lenor Larsen as art. However, to some, a coffee table is just a coffee table, and a weaving is just a piece of cloth!
BTW Marilyn, are you painting and sculpting at an art school or a crafts school?
Walter
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On Saturday, February 5, 2005, at 07:56 PM, Marilyn wrote:
Craft (not art) now on display athttp://www.rit.edu/~andpph/gallery.html includes:
I'm just curious and I've often wondered (I'm sure this has been discussed on Photoforum before, but I've got to ask). How do you differentiate between art and crafts, Bob? There seems to be a very fine line for separating the two and now that I'm involved in visual arts other than photography (sculpture, painting, etc.) it is often times very difficult to decide which item is art and which is a craft item.
I'd really appreciate hearing from other members how they divide the two areas.
Marilyn ________________________________
Leave gentle fingerprints on the soul of another for the angels to read.
Proverb __________________________________
