The C**** Word

Dale Chihuly Tony Cragg Anish Kapoor Rosemarie Trockel Paul Evans George Nakashima Brychtova & Libensky Wendell Castle

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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.”

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.

To be sure, the argument over what you call craft, and whether you celebrate it by waving its flag or dissolving its boundaries, can seem academic. “I think we get too focused on the definition and not focused on celebrating and exploring what’s actually being created,” says the Craft Council’s Branagan, who doesn’t buy into the postcraft idea. (“We’re not going to become the Council formerly known as Craft,” she jokes.) But in the real world, do the definitions make a difference?

From a market standpoint, the answer is unclear. “In the 1990s and early 2000s, you could argue that putting something in a contemporary-art [versus a craft or design] sale would generate larger prices,” says Zemaitis, of Sotheby’s, which until 2002 held craft sales under the rubric Contemporary Works of Art. “But it’s gotten a bit blurred, and now I think the prices would generally be about the same.” Jones, the Bonhams specialist, concurs: “People are willing to pay more for a good piece, regardless of the material.”

Ask MAD director Hotchner, however, and you hear an entirely different story. The title American Craft Museum deterred not only sponsors and funders, “many of whom did not relate to the idea of craft,” she says, but also press coverage and audiences—even artists and shows from other institutions. For example, “Betty refused to show at the Craft Museum,” Protetch says of Woodman, who considers herself an artist first and foremost. “She held out for the Met.” Since MAD’s rebranding, according to Hotchner, things have improved on all fronts.

However, this past August, the museum pulled another surprise when it announced that its new deputy director for curatorial affairs, Barbara Bloemink, had left after just seven months on the job. By all accounts, the split was amicable. “I don’t want to work with boundaries [between disciplines] anymore,” explains Bloemink, who had come to the Museum of Arts & Design with a background in, well, art and design. But wasn’t the whole point of the museum’s new name to break with boundaries? Bloemink, a museum statement read, “was not a good fit [with] MAD’s continuing emphasis on contemporary crafts, art and design as a reflection of the museum’s craft heritage.” Sure enough, craft may be dead, but long live craft.

"The C**** Word" originally appeared in the November 2007 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's November 2007 Table of Contents.