And though others might still regard craft as the frumpy housewife to art and design’s femme fatale, that bias seems to be dissipating within the contemporary-art and design worlds themselves. With such pieces as the embroidered vases of Dutch design star Hella Jongerius and her compatriot Marcel Wanders’s now-iconic 1996 Knotted Chair—a high-tech take on, of all things, macrame—designers are unfurling the craft banner as they retreat from the machine aesthetic toward work that bears the mark of the hand. Reflecting everything from a desire for uniqueness to a comforting return to the act of making, the trend is being reinforced at the big-ticket end by the skyrocketing market for “design art” or “art furniture,” a genre often sold beside craft pieces from such names as Castle and Nakashima.

Within the fine-art world, the enthusiasm is spottier. But major gallerists like New York’s Max Protetch have no qualms about representing craft makers—in his case, the ceramists Betty Woodman and the late Richard DeVore—alongside fine artists. “I don’t see a distinction between what they do and art,” Protetch says, noting that Woodman, whose work merges painting and sculpture with ceramics, was the subject of a retrospective last year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York. “They are artists who work in clay, just like [fine artists] Tony Cragg and Mary Heilmann.” Indeed, for many, craft at its best is just as infused with content (traditionally art’s domain) as art is informed by process and materials (craft’s bailiwick). The art-craft dynamic thus goes both ways. Consider “Makers and Models: Works in Ceramic,” the season-opening show at New York’s Barbara Gladstone gallery, which overtly referenced craft in the ceramic forays of 28 blue-chip artists, among them Heilmann, Anish Kapoor and Rosemarie Trockel.

Add to all this the evidence of a new mainstream infatuation with crafts—such once unthinkable phenomena as hipster knitting circles and trendy do-it-yourself magazines—and you have the makings of a movement that is not only top-down but from the ground up and, auspiciously, young. “There’s a real resurgence of interest among the younger generation, almost as if it skipped a generation,” says Carmine Branagan, executive director of the American Craft Council. Tellingly, Branagan recently lured 34-year-old Andrew Wagner, a founding editor of the stylish design magazine Dwell, to relaunch American Craft magazine—a move that, not long ago, would have been considered career suicide for a publishing up-and-comer. “I’ve never seen craft as anything but incredibly positive,” Wagner says. “People get confused by craft, because it has this vast definition. But I don’t think my generation has a problem with that. In fact, it’s exciting.”

Still, as outsiders embrace the term craft, many insiders have been shying away from it. Following MAD’s lead, the storied California College of Arts and Crafts, in San Francisco, is now simply the California College of the Arts. (Adding another twist, in 2003 the Kentucky Art and Craft Foundation, in Louisville, rechristened itself the Kentucky Museum of Arts + Design. However, facing resistance and confusion, it has since reverted to the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft.) And Mark Lyman, the founding director of SOFA, the prominent high-end crafts fair, won’t even touch the C-word, except as a verb or common noun. Held annually in Chicago (November) and New York (May), SOFA stands for Sculpture Objects & Functional Art—anything, it seems, but craft. “For some people, to be relegated to work that’s called craft, rather than art, seems derogatory,” explains Lyman, who goes so far as to argue that the studio craft movement has had its day. Instead, he is heralding what he calls a “postcraft” era, in which craft—referring simply to “process of material and issues of virtuosity”—might apply equally to, say, a Voulkos ceramic and a Kiki Smith sculpture. By abandoning craft as a discipline, Lyman wants to expand the umbrella of craft as an idea.