"Liberation from bias is exhilarating"

Can we continue to separate “CRAFT” from “ART”? MARIAN PASTOR ROCES thinks not. 

The word “craft” (in rabbit ears) is typically assigned to things thought to be rather- but-not-quite art. For example, “craft” is a “tribal” ikat-dyed textile while art is the Picasso or Warhol. Rather, Art, capital A.

Craft on the other hand is inevitably spelled with a lower-case c. The asymmetrical hierarchy between A and c has been well established since the Renaissance. Not only in the Euro-American world. Few notice A’s unremarked assumption of superiority to the inferiority of c.

Still, there’s always the vexing foils to the A/c binary. The Costume Institute exists imperiously within the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, magisterially indifferent to silly ideas about fashion as not-art. That fashion is some kind of “craft” has long ago yielded to reason.

Jewelry sculpted by expatriate Duddley Diaz or by the late National Artist Arturo Luz cannot be contained by the small c. Gabriel Barredo’s chairs exceed the confines of this duality; certainly, the category of furniture cannot be adequate. And so do the oeuvres of Kenneth Cobonpue and Lor Calma escape such confinement. The word Art fits securely in these cases.