'Craftsperson', 'artist', 'designer': problematising the 'art versus commerce' divide within Australian creative fields today
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2020
Authors
Luckman, S.
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Bennett, T.
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Book chapter
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Source details - Title: The Australian Art Field: Practices, Policies, Institutions, 2020 / Bennett, T. (ed./s), Ch.4, pp.56-68
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In his book the Invention of Craft (2013), leading craft curator and scholar Glenn Adamson argues that ‘craft’ as we know it today came into being in the mid-nineteenth century when it was cast as the Industrial Revolution’s ‘Other’, deliberately rupturing links between artisanal making and manufacture; craft and technology. Today still one of the key tensions in play in the identity choices and boundary contestations lies between those who seek to identify their craft practice with the art field, and those desiring of, or more comfortable with, an identification closer to the economic field of economic power which tends to be marked by their identification with ‘design’ in some form. In the twentieth century, this break was consolidated even further through greater strategic alignment by many craftspeople of their work with that of the arts field, with all the claims to perceived greater value, skill and creative originality this affords. More recently, the very same neo-liberalism which gave rise to the creative industries agenda is now driving art, craft and design education even closer together as budget cuts lead to the winding back of expensive studios, workshops and supervised hand-on training in universities. Thus,students of craft spend much of their time in more traditional classrooms, learning a book or screen-centred arts theory syllabus with its at best ambivalent relationship to the market. Drawing upon empirical data from a four-year Australian Research Council funded national study of Australian design craft micro-enterprises, this chapter explores the how the historical legacies of the arts field today intersect with those of design and craft and the reality of portfolio careers.It finds that contemporary craft practice in Australia today is a splintering field marked by its burgeoning nomenclature: ‘designer’, ‘designer maker’, ‘maker’, ‘artisan’, ‘artist’, ‘craftsperson’, but despite this multiplicity there exists a profound sense of concern that fundamental haptic craft skills are being lost as a result of cut-backs to hands-on studio teaching.
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Copyright 2020 Taylor & Francis
Access Condition Notes: Accepted manuscript available after 1 January 2022