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Overview
What is craft? How is it different from fine art or design? In A Theory of Craft, Howard Risatti examines these issues by comparing handmade ceramics, glass, metalwork, weaving, and furniture to painting, sculpture, photography, and machine-made design from Bauhaus to the Memphis Group. He describes craft as uniquely blending function with a deeper expression of human values that transcend culture, time, and space. Craft must articulate a role for itself in contemporary society, says Risatti; otherwise it will be absorbed by fine art or design, and its singular approach to understanding the world will be lost.
Editorials
From the Publisher
"A well-organized argument for the consideration of craft as art and its elevation in status. . . . An important contribution to the field of contemporary craft activity and its contributions."-Wintherthur Portfolio"Destined to become required reading for undergraduate and graduate courses in art and craft history. . . . A book worth waiting for."—Ceramics Monthly
"An unprecedented effort to define crafts and to place the work in a cultural context, both differentiating it from and aligning it with other aesthetic activities. Risatti's fluent, knowledgeable approach and his emphatic categorizing should be widely read—not because he offers a final answer but because his extraordinary book is so stimulating and provocative."—Janet Koplos, senior editor, Art in America
"With a writing style that is direct and engaging, Risatti examines the value of the handmade in an age of mass-production and constructs a critical framework for evaluating the place of craft media in today's art environment."—FiberArts
Library Journal
This scholarly work lays out reasons for the historical dichotomy in Western philosophy between fine art and craft. Risatti (art history, emeritus, Virginia Commonwealth Univ.; Postmodern Perspectives: Issues in Contemporary Art) argues that aesthetic standards for craft separate from those of the traditional fine arts are necessary for craft to receive the status it deserves in the art community. He points out that non-Western traditional societies don't make such distinctions and that their artwork is a functioning part of daily life. Since fine craftworks in the marketplace now approach the prices paid for fine art, this is a problem that may be solving itself. Suitable for academic art libraries.
—Constance Ashmore Fairchild