October 1, 2003
9/30/03 Tessa and I got
Tessa and I got talking about the Remsen, NY "Barn Festival of the Arts" I mentioned two days ago - and we realized that it had no barns involved, and that the "arts" were probably more properly categorized as "crafts." I look at "art" as a singular statement, the message conveyed by an artisan with a particular point in mind. Transitively, "crafts" are objects (or "notions," as our grandmothers called them) that are produced in batches, and consumers are not so much interested in the singular craft, but the genre as a whole. You don't buy a particular ceramic dalmatian as a love for one of them, you buy one because you appreciate crap like that in general.
Yes, you can have multiple copies of a work of art (reprints of a Chagall painting, DVDs of Hitchcock), but the singular act of making that painting - or movie - remains the same.
Tessa disagreed - she said that a "craft" is defined as a way of doing things, i.e., jigsawing common girls' names with wood and putting them on a key ring. To her, "art" is a bit more noble concept.
Or maybe I just think that calling it the Remsen Festival of the Arts was a bit of an oversell, when you consider how many aprons festooned with crying puppies there were in one place.
I think we can both agree that putting the words together to form "arts and crafts" always conjures up long, tedious afternoons gluing macaroni pasta to a bunch of fucking paper plates.
So what have we learned today? Which of the following is art, and which are crafts?
