Podcasts
Krista Bennett Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
This podcast is intended for educational use only.
At the beginning of the 21st century the crafts occupy a \"contested landscape of unstable meanings\". Craft terminology is problematic, varying across historical, cultural and linguistic boundaries, and blurring between the designation of craft objects and the methods of their production. Moreover, beginning in the 1870's when Arts and Crafts advocates used the crafts to realize contemporaneous theories of social reform, the crafts have defined themselves as much by what they are not as what they are. Whether positioned as antidote to dehumanized mechanization, demoralized aesthetics or canonic exclusion; as pejorative foil to fine arts intellectualism and rationalized progress; as either conscious reaction to or the unwitting dupe of elitist marginalization, the crafts consistently have been framed within hierarchized binaries, constituted as 'Other' to dominant hegemonies. This paper discusses the shortcomings of such essentialized and polarized readings of the crafts, particularly regarding anti-modernism (and the implied modernism this term opposes and privileges), positing a more nuanced and comprehensive view of the crafts in contemporary society.
Edward S. Cooke Jr. "Modern Craft and the American Experience", American Art, XXI, 1, (Spring 2007), 2.
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L'auteure explore la problématique – au niveau historique, linguistique, et culturel – reliée au terme "craft". Ce mot, qui désigne à la fois les objets produits et leur mode de production, est souvent définit par ce qu'il n'est pas, plutôt que par ce qu'il est. Elle présente les difficultés qu'occasionnent cette polarisation.