The C**** Word

Next fall, when New York’s Museum of Arts & Design inaugurates its new home, at 2 Columbus Circle, it will close the book on at least one controversy: its radical alteration of the existing building, a 1960s Edward Durell Stone design that many municipal arts and civic groups had fought hard to preserve. But left unresolved will be the debate sparked by the museum’s name—or rather, by the word left out of its name, craft.

Until 2002, the Museum of Arts & Design was called the American Craft Museum. When it dropped craft from its title, many saw the move as confounding at best—prompting no shortage of “MAD” jokes—and at worst a renunciation of the institution’s half-century legacy as the standard bearer of haute craft: works like the Expressionist ceramics of Peter Voulkos, the organic wood furniture of Wendell Castle and the abstract sculptural glass of Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtova. In a field plagued by associations with, say, your grandmother’s macrame, MAD wasn’t so much modifying its mission as it was tackling an image problem, while also trumpeting a growing crossover between creative disciplines. Yet in doing so, it aggravated an identity crisis within the field of craft. What happened to the word in the museum’s moniker? “The art world has changed enormously,” director Holly Hotchner explained at the time. “I would say that is the biggest reason why we changed our name.”

Or perhaps more to the point, the craft world is changing. Five years after the museum made its switch, the tussle over craft’s role and definition—in fact, its viability as a discrete discipline—rages on. Rooted in the Arts & Crafts movement of the turn of the 20th century and flowering in postwar America with the studio craft movement—represented by Voulkos, Castle and the like—the category can be broadly defined as comprising work made by hand in ceramics, glass, wood, metal and fiber. But look beyond the parameters of history, process and material to the realms of expression and function, and the issue of identity gets knottier. Simply put, what is craft’s relationship to art and design when their boundaries are becoming ever more permeable? What exactly is “craft,” and what kinds of value judgments does the term imply? Underlying these questions is a curious contradiction: The contemporary craft world, such as it is, can seem to be unraveling even as it appears poised for a heyday.

From the auction perspective, craft objects are booming. In studio furniture, “we’re seeing exponential increases and new world records for masters nearly every season,” says James Zemaitis, the head of Sotheby’s 20th-century-design department, which has set the records for George Nakashima ($822,400, fetched by a freeform Arlyn table in December 2006) and Paul Evans ($150,000, for a pair of sideboards, June 2007). Meanwhile, Sollo Rago auction house, in Lambertville, New Jersey, which holds the record for Wharton Esherick ($312,000, brought by his 1927 three-panel walnut folding screen in October 2006), saw its spring 2007 results for studio furniture and ceramics more than double over the previous year, to $2.6 million. And this past June, Bonhams’s first ceramics auction in New York smashed records for 22 makers, including Suzuki Osamu, whose horse sculpture Kouma fetched $84,000, and Richard Notkin, whose Curbside teapot brought $6,600. “There are more and more collectors who have an understanding of modern and contemporary art who are now looking toward craft as well,” says Marijke Jones, head of contemporary ceramics at Bonhams. “What’s recently being made is often quite abstract and often on a larger scale, which makes it better suited to many collecting tastes.”

Meanwhile, museums are burnishing craft’s image with such high-profile exhibitions as “Ornament as Art: Avant-Garde Jewelry from the Helen Williams Drutt Collection,” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, through January 21, and “Shy Boy, She Devil and Isis: The Art of Conceptual Craft,” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through January 6. The latter is composed of selections from the collection of Ronald and Anita Wornick, who have promised 250 objects to the museum, including glass by Dale Chihuly, ceramics by Voulkos and furniture by Castle. The Wornicks’ aim in making their gift was to align craft with fine art. “We decided to give our collection to a fine arts museum because it is a fine arts museum,” says Anita Wornick. “I’m so tired of the [craft versus art] discussion. To me, it’s all either good art or bad art—period.”