A Fine Line

摘要

'Craft or art' is a historically resonant but ultimately arbitrary distinction. Just how arbitrary becomes clear when you try to translate 'craft' into other languages than English: it is sometimes simply untranslatable, and even where a kind of equivalent is available, the overtones are different. In Italian, as if to confuse us, the correct translation of 'craft' is frequently arte. Yet however we may deprecate the distinction, the status of craftsmen/women, and whether they are doing something different from what 'artists' do, are issues that can still perplex makers of ceramic art. Like many received Western ideas about art, the notion that 'craft' is something different from and inferior to 'fine art' has its origins in the Italian Renaissance. It arose not from any decline in the status of practitioners of the applied arts, but in a rapid, unprecedented, and in some degree planned, rise in the status of painters, sculptors, and architects.