ART VS.  CRAFT

I read Stephanie Ross’s excerpted “Gardens and the Death of Art” in the July issue and was dismayed that the dictums of earlier decades are still finding refuge in critical writing after being largely discredited by many respected art historians and critics.  Although Ross’s writing is well-researched and scholarly she has failed to take into account many contributing factors that bear upon her central questions.

First, in her queries concerning the now “moribund” arts of stained glass, gardening, and tapestry she assumes that the authors of objects or products in those media thought about art in the same way we do.  Art, as we have come to accept and define it, began a little over two hundred years ago when social and intellectual trends converged, eventually producing “modernity” or the era of enlightenment.  With this development came new subjects and areas of interest, among them one called “aesthetics,” the goal of which is to uncover overriding principles of beauty, taste, and truth common to all the arts and make them examples of “fine” art.  Until the enlightenment no other society had considered art to be an entity in itself.  There was no reason to believe (as we take for granted today) that the makers of paintings, gardens, sculpture, poems, carvings, et cetera belonged to a “super” category called artists” or that their products did either.

During the ensuing generations many scientific and societal changes had a profound effect upon artistic products and because viewers could no longer decipher the intention of the artist a new and most important role was developed of which Ross is a part: the writer/critic.  With the rise and necessity of the writer about art, literacy became a requisite for appreciation of the art product.  Today theory, its comprehension, and its interpretation have become more important than the work itself.  So in order to tell the difference between a pile of stones or a carpet inside a museum or found on the pavement outside or in a carpet store elsewhere one must view those in the museum through a special “lens” of knowledge, made available through theory and disseminated by the printed word.  The acceptance of the necessity of theory and interpretation in