Art verses Craft

This debate has been going on, in one form or another, since the beginning of the last Century. Unless you are new to marquetry, you undoubtedly have been exposed to articles dealing with this dilemma. Most of the ones I have read are opinionated by authors who believe their view is the right one. Examples are those that call themselves artists (usually without any formal art training)....therefore whatever they create is art. This egoistical determination, by itself, dismisses any rational approach to themselves and their work. I could cite a few other examples of the above, but every one is a product derived from the theory of relativism. The word art is used all too frequently and after a while it ceases to have any meaning.

What is needed is a coherent understanding of the relationship of one to the other and this is best done by consulting the histories of men qualified to do so. In the beginning the Greek philosophers wrote on this very topic. They believed that crafts workers were more valuable than artists in the social order. Some of that thought prevails today in the European Union where imported crafts are value-taxed at a higher rate than art. The comparison may not seem viable, but it shows the measure placed on these objects by ordinary people. In the eighteenth Century there was Denis Diderot, the great French Encyclopedist, who chronicled all the "mechanical arts" of his time. Below are engravings of an ebenisterie (marquetry) workshop and one of mosaic (inlay) makers from the Encyclopédie.




Diderot was also an art critic (one of the first) during the Paris Salons. His interpretation of art was derived from aestheticism. He proclaimed art had a duality - it had to be pleasing to the artist as well as all those who viewed it. His more gifted counterpart was the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. He broadened the scope of aestheticism in his "Critique of Judgment" where he defined the difference between art and craft. Art, he says, is more than a beautiful object - it must communicate an idea without having a function. Craft is always functional. And in our own time we have the British philosopher R.G. Collingwood who surmised that art is spontaneous without any preparation or design. Craft on the other hand is the result of a preconceived idea or plan.

With this hypothesis it is doubtful whether anyone has ever seen any marquetry that was art. Do we really need to ask ourselves when viewing an object of marquetry. . . is it art or craft? I think not. For a lot of us we just enjoy marquetry without labels. Period.