Choice from America: Modern American Ceramics

'Choice from America: Modern American Ceramics' by Arthur C. Danto and Janet Koplos

- C21st ceramics- enlargement or extreme minimisation, multiplying or else reducing- rendering the work banal or sublimating
- Clay- early 1980s- art was battered/ stabbed/ smashed/ distorted
- Craft refers to pre-industrial methods of producing objects of use and of embellishment
- In identifying oneself as a crafts person one implicitly took a stand against the culture of the Machine- declaring an allegiance to earlier and less alienating forms of life
- The hand-loomed, the hand-wrought, the hand-woven, the hand-made, the hand-blown, the home- spun
- Same domestic functions as their mass produced counterparts
- Craft- partly moral and partly aesthetic
- Critically dismissive term, like 'decorative' or 'literary' or 'illustrational'

- In the 'Critique of Judgement', Kant distinguished between free and independent art- the latter 'is ascribed to objects which come under the concept of a particular purpose'
- Dissociates free art from the category of purpose- Kant characterises beauty as 'purposive without any specific purpose'

- Hegel, in his 'Lectures on Aesthetics', claims craftwork can be art but never at its 'highest vocation'- only in its freedom alone can fine art truly be art

- However it is not only art historians that take this narrow-minded view. Richard Serra famously said that 'as soon as art is forced or persuaded to serve alien values, it ceases to serve its own needs'- Therefore claiming that to take away art's uselessness was to make it other than art

- Therefore modern ceramists seem to be attempting to challenge this time-held viewpoint, atleast to a certain extent, by mirroring the movements of modern art. For example when the American Abstract Expressionists began to gesturally handle their paint, ceramists began to leave overt hand marks in their clay.