A Reckoning with Art
In December 2021, I participated as an audience member in an interactive, virtual panel discussion organized by the American Craft Council. The event was called ‘Future Insights’ and featured five speakers: a craft magazine editor, a museum curator, an art critic, and a couple of podcast hosts we probably all know (and love), Amy and Brien of ‘Cut the Craft’. The format of the talk had all the speakers introducing themselves and describing how they functioned within the craft community. After introductions, each speaker had breakout discussions with groups of audience members to work on ACC’s goal “… to listen to craft communities and their needs so as to develop and innovate solutions and implement new ideas for support.”
The curator, editor and critic had an air of art world pretension. Lots of talk about artists’ statements, self-aggrandizement, listing of achievements. It was the language of art school, BFAs and MFAs. For me, the climax of snobbery was when the critic ended his introduction claiming that us artists (I thought this was the American Craft Council) in the audience needed critics to tell us what we were making. I took immediate offense.
You can watch these introductions yourself if you want to burn a couple hours. ACC Future Insights
And it turns out I wasn’t alone. When the breakout discussions began, there was a palpable vibe among the audience that this whole discussion wasn't for them. There was a middle age, life-long craftswoman wondering why just making wasn’t enough. Wondering why she needed thoughtful artist statements with deep societal implications to be taken seriously as a craftsperson. Wasn’t showing up in the studio and doing the work enough? I piped up with my own similar feelings. We said our piece and time ran out without much of a discussion.
The event was over and it left me stewing for days. I came face to face with this sense of divide between art and craft. I’m sure many in this craft community have probably felt it. I lingered on what the art critic had said about makers needing critics to tell the makers what they were making. The nerve! And yet, a small part of me acknowledged there may be some truth in that, even if the delivery was full of braggadocio. The confrontation stirred ways of thinking I hadn’t used in a long time.
Seventeen years ago, I was on a path toward a degree in art history from the University of Michigan. There was nothing predetermined about it. I was aimless in college and felt no aspirations to a particular goal. I took an art history course on a whim and it blew open my mind. It introduced me to new ways of seeing and thinking. I saw how certain currents of art pushed an evolution in human consciousness.
And then I was taught how art collapsed in on itself during the transition from modernism to postmodernism. Everything became ironic and self-referential to a point of absurdity. Art was dead.
I couldn’t reconcile these two sides of art history. Both felt real. I tried taking more courses in the AH department. Nothing equalled my previous excitement or helped dispel my despair. Big changes were happening in my personal life. I broke up with UofM (it was mutual). I mostly stopped thinking about art. I left college with a chip on my shoulder.
But those art history courses did expose me to art criticism. I remembered that it wasn’t necessarily about proclaiming works to be objectively bad or objectively good. It wasn’t about telling you what to think about art, but how to think about art. And not just one way to think, but many ways, many lines of questioning, many perspectives to try on. Maybe the Craft Council critic had a point.
Within a couple months of the ACC discussion, my feelings of indignation waned. For the first time in sixteen years, I began reading books of art criticism. I started with the collected writings of Donald Judd, both a critic and an artist. Maybe I could trust the words of another creator with skin in the game, rather than just an outside observer. I loved it. I revisited modernist critics from where I left off in college. It was great. I dabbled in contemporary critique. That’s when I felt some big change happening. The art-shaped chip on my shoulder was fading.
The most impactful ideas are coming from Jerry Saltz’s new book, Art is Life. Saltz is a Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism, and is the senior art critic at New York magazine. His writing is fun and easy to read. I think someone with no knowledge of art could pick up this book and not be made to feel like an outsider. It’s a collection of personal stories, criticism and essays spanning the last twenty years.
That timeline roughly covers the entire period of my introduction to and disenchantment with art. It addresses both the arc of history I was taught at UofM and everything I’d missed out on since. It felt coincidental. His personal story only added to the coincidence. He didn’t start writing until he was 40 (I’m 38). He’s a college dropout.
It all added up to a feeling of being granted permission.
Saltz allows everything. He allows contradiction. Museums can be evil shrines of power projection, and temples of enchantment. Art history can be biased and artificial, and also full of meaning. You can hold onto the artists and movements you adore while giving overlooked work a seat at the table. His writing gave me permission to move past my hangups and to enjoy art again. I don’t have to pretend to know everything about everything to like a painting that moves me in some way. I don’t have to be able to properly categorize a piece of art within an accepted historical lineage to have thoughts about it. History can be rearranged, reassessed to answer new questions.
A new freedom to experience and enjoy art again is only part of the benefit I’ve gained from this renewed exposure to criticism. Reigniting a way of thinking is the other. This is what I want to dig into here. I see a difference between the art and craft worlds when it comes to asking the types of questions that come through criticism. It doesn’t seem to exist much in our world of traditional craft. Maybe there’s a legitimate reason for this. Maybe it’s an unreasonable comparison. Could/should these critical points of view be applied to the craft world, to my own work? Are there potential benefits? Would a critical lens help me better understand what I’m making or why? I intend to explore these questions in coming blogs.
I was on that same ACC call but left before the breakout sessions even started, feeling strongly that I was in the wrong place.
As someone who appreciates art and even considered a career as a studio artist before becoming a designer, I'm struck by the profound difference between the contemporary artist's practice of staking claim to his very specific niche (and then needing to defend and evolve it) and the craftsman's freedom to make for the value of the thing made.
This isn't precisely a comment on the objects themselves and yet very often when viewing contemporary art I feel drawn into its striving whereas when living with handcraft I feel my place in the world is affirmed. When I'm making, that sense is deepened further.
On a different note, I really appreciate the way you talk about being granted permission. I've come to find that very important in my own life at different hinge moments. I look forward to seeing where this leads.
Back when I was doing lots of writing, I was also doing a ton of reading. At some point it occurred to me that reading, itself, is an act that completes the writing, and it happens each time we read, each time we think about what we’ve read, and we can “write” a story we’re reading (or living!) differently each time we consider it. It happens through our individual ways of perceiving, our general and momentary perspectives, our cultural and educational training, our unconscious frames of reference, etc. Criticism, in some ways, feels like the act of fixing and making opaque the frame of reference. I think there’s value in this, in that allows me to see differently, and to recognize that I, too, have my own limited ways of seeing. I think, though, it’s important to remember that even the most intelligent and intellectually rigorous criticism also has its limits. Lastly, as a personal choice, I’m uncomfortable with the idea of making for the critic, and I tend to be less interested in art of any sort that’s produced with the critic (or even an audience) in mind - it has the feeling of “product.” I know this is a fuzzy zone. I recognize that commerce has demands, and that artists and crafts folk need to survive.
Anyway, Dawson, thanks for doing this, and thanks for providing the opportunity for conversation.