Yesterday's NY Times Article: Art vs Craft

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Steve Immerman
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Yesterday's NY Times Article: Art vs Craft

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NY Times

April 28, 2003
The Luster of Glass Joins Art's Mainstream
By STEPHEN KINZER

TACOMA, Wash. — When the Museum of Glass opened in a striking cone-shaped building here last summer, many people in Tacoma took it as a symbol of this city's rebirth. Long considered a gritty and drab stepsister to sophisticated Seattle, 30 miles to the north, Tacoma is becoming chic, with boutiques and cafes lining waterfront blocks that were ugly and crime-ridden just a few years ago.

The opening of this museum also reflects a growing recognition that glassmaking and other pursuits traditionally dismissed as crafts have reached a level of artistic quality. An exhibition now at the Museum of Glass reflects the rising ambitions of many glassmakers, ceramic artists, woodworkers, metalsmiths, fabric creators and others who work in fields once considered by critics and curators as mere artisanry. This show focuses on the work of the Swedish-born Bertil Vallien, who uses sand, embedded masks and figurines, and other techniques in his glass sculptures.

Although this museum is formally known as the Museum of Glass: International Center for Contemporary Art, it does not use terms like glass artist or glass art. "That tends to be a way to marginalize the work, the same thing that happens when you say black artists or female artists," said the museum's director, Josi Callan. "We consider ourselves a contemporary art museum with a focus on glass but an interest in the broader artistic context. There's no question we're breaking new ground, and we sense a great public interest in what we're doing.

"Over the last 10 years," she added, "glass has really been coming into its own as a fine-arts medium. We're where photography was 20 years ago. More museums are adding glass works to their permanent collections. It's part of this broadening view of what constitutes fine art."

One reason that glass has made the jump from being perceived as craft to being perceived as art is the work of Dale Chihuly, who critics say pushed the boundaries of glassworking and, in his sculpture, blurred the line between decorative and fine art. Mr. Chihuly, who was born in Tacoma, has work in hundreds of public and private collections around the world, displayed everywhere from museums to restaurants and casinos.

The Museum of Glass was originally envisioned as a place where Mr. Chihuly could show his own work, but now the museum features rotating shows, although two permanent installations by Mr. Chihuly decorate a bridge that leads to the entrance.

"Boundaries between artists and craftsmen have melded considerably since the 1960's, when I began exhibiting," Mr. Chihuly said. "Now people use the materials that suit the ideas they want to express."

The line separating art from craft has always been subjectively drawn. Sometimes the difference was said to be in intent, art created solely for its own sake while crafted objects were meant to be useful. At other times the medium has been considered the key difference. Oil painting, for example, was automatically considered an artist's medium, and works in fabric, wood or clay consigned to lesser talents.

In recent years, however, glassmakers seem to have succeeded in changing the public's perception of what they do. Those working in other mediums view the glassmakers' success with a mixture of admiration and envy.

"The glass people are definitely ahead of us," said James A. Wallace, director of the National Ornamental Metal Museum in Memphis, which exhibits works ranging from jewelry to monumental sculpture. "They did it right. They never sold cheap, and they very consciously nurtured the image of being artists rather than craftspeople."

But Mr. Wallace said that the rising quality of metalwork, woodwork and ceramics had led many art lovers and critics to shift their perceptions. "Since the beginning of art history, crafts have been considered minor arts, the child left out on the street corner," he said. "Just in the last few years I've seen that stereotype really start to change. We're moving into the artistic mainstream."

Recent exhibitions at the metal museum reflect this move. One show featured strikingly original jars, vases and incense burners by Harlan W. Butt, whose work is collected by mainstream museums like the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Some curators consider the word craft a negative term and seek to avoid it. Last year the American Craft Museum in New York changed its name to the Museum of Arts and Design.

David Revere McFadden, that museum's chief curator, explained: "We did a lot of consultation and work with focus groups, and when we asked them what craft means, they came up with reactions like handiwork, busy work, rural, nonprofessional, folk art, humble, brown and scratchy, macramé plant hangers. There's been such an eroding of the traditional borders between various fields that we decided it was a mistake to keep using that word."

"Since we announced the change," he said, "we've had a tremendous positive response from artists. They tell us that they've always considered themselves artists."

Not every museum that features craft-based art, however, is running from the word. The Mint Museum of Craft and Design in Charlotte, N.C., continues to embrace it. "There is a misperception of what the word craft really means," said Mark Richard Leach, who until recently was the museum's director. "Many people link it to handicrafts and think of hooked rugs or paint-by-number projects. We've failed to brand the word properly.

"Our goal is to train and sensitize the unfamiliar eye to distinguish the fine line that delineates where intent, skill, experience and outcome conspire to transcend hobby," Mr. Leach said. "This is where craft assumes a different order of meaning and begins to exemplify a fundamental human impulse to manipulate materials into objects of utility, beauty or contemplation.

"I hope," he added, "that a newly educated and admiring public will demand use of the word craft as a measure of respect for that impulse."
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