Hi Peter,

I enjoyed your post.

I've been wondering about some related issues.

You write of a distinction between "art" and "craft". And of the historical 
'highness', aka 'power' or social status, or sometimes economic status, of 
"art" over "craft".

I've been thinking about certain contemporary art in related terms. For 
instance, there is a sense in which net art is perceived as "folk art". Even 
your main BBC arts editor, Will Gompertz, could recently hazard that no 
artist had yet made a significant work of net art (see 
http://tinyurl.com/ycvpel9 ). I presume the sort of 'significance' he had in 
mind has to do with the valorization of the work in the 'highest' of art 
circles and institutional support reserved for the 'very best' of art.

Whatever sorts of arts are barred entrance to these sorts of elite art 
valorizations are not necessarily outside all art, as it were, but simply 
outside of something that risks its own continuing relevance by barring the 
door to some of the best contemporary art.

Sometimes arts remain strongly marginalized, such as mail art.

One of the main matters in the distinction usually has to do with the place 
of the object within the economy of art. Is it salable? Is it salable in an 
art context? Can it generate economic wealth? No attractive successes exist 
concerning net art and the generation of economic wealth.

Craft or folk art is usually inexpensive or free. So is net art.

Also, folk art is often stitched together from already-existing folk art 
standards or relatively popular pieces. Similarly, the programming in net 
art is often cribbed together from google searches for code in programming 
languages such as Javascript, Actionscript, Lingo, PHP, Perl, Java, 
Processing, and so on. Knowledge of programming is relatively rare compared 
with the need to use functioning code.

Also, the online 'communities' concerned with net art tend to approach it 
with a kind of a craft-oriented mentality. Lots of videos on youtube. Lots 
of stuff about offline projects but not much real net art. The 
self-satisfaction level and group-satisfaction level is folk art level. 
There is no significant interest by the group in pushing beyond the folk art 
level. Too scary. Programming. Scary stuff. Something unique? Yes but will 
it play on Facebook? Better a million eyeballs watching one's video than a 
mystery and small audience of pluginned concoction. Media for a very brief 
moment. Firefly media. Around the global village fire. But usually the 
audience is quite small, actually, for net art of any kind, not youtube mega 
audiences but networked micro audiences.

As a net artist, I understand I could make the best net art in the known 
universe but still it won't be 'significant' in the terms of a Will 
Gompertz. And the sort of analysis you were writing concerning the "craft" 
versus "art" power distinction seems quite strongly related to the above 
sorts of questions.

One of the conclusions I draw from all this is that once net artists start 
being able to support themselves with their work via sales they themselves 
control and promote, the tune will change somewhat, over time. Which is to 
say that the types of power you allude to are regulated less by aesthetic or 
philosophical acuity and judgement as by economic viability in some sort of 
significant economy of art.

Contemporary music benefits greatly by the connectivity of its highs and 
lows. Folk music has its 'high' spots. Joan Baez, for example. Or Judy 
Collins, even. Or Joni Mitchell. My favorite contemporary folk music is by 
Vicki Bennett at http://www.peoplelikeus.org . She's a Brit living in New 
York.

Which is just to briefly say that the connection of net art with 'folk', in 
all the dimensions of that term, is not simply a sentence to artistic 
obscurity and inconsequence but a source of life and vitality. The current 
connections among the 'folkish 'and 'art' of various levels is well-fabled 
in the postmodern.

ja
http://vispo.com


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Peter Riley" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, February 27, 2010 2:19 AM
Subject: Re: Response


>
> Well at least, Alison, we know what "craft" is.  But "art" -- who on
> earth knows what that is? Most of the arguments I've seen about it are
> circular: Art is superior to design because it's art. Even Heidegger's
> distinction looks to me like special pleading  ("forms of truth
> happening" doesn't require any materiality at all.) and I don't see
> that a finely sculpted cornice or a skilled and sensitive jig by an
> Irish fiddler isn't a realisation of incipient truth,  a disclosure of
> further world, etc., any less than anything else is.
>
> And didn't "art" earlier mean just that, making something? And didn't
> "poet" mean person who makes?
>
> How about this for an improvised thesis: We've inherited the concept
> "art" from agrarian societies in which a small dominant group had all
> the political power and maintained its separation by linguistic and
> cultural means including religious as well as administrative and
> military, which involved maintaining a separate language and modes of
> understanding inaccessible to the mass of the population. They had
> "art", the peasants had "craft". And that habit is still with us, we
> still maintain our group high-cultures and their languages whether it
> be Latin, Sanskrit, Mandarin, avant-garde, "Cambridge-poetry" or
> whatever kind of language it was or is.   Art is always "up", craft is
> "raised" to it. And that up, that above us, means power, whether it is
> actually implementable or not, and privilege, whether material or not.
>
> Pr