54
HAROLD ROSENBERG
decreases the significance of the handmade as such in determining what
is and what is not art. In their originals both artist and craftsman
preserve the quality of the human touch and a control of their materials
more flexible than that of the machine.
What defines art as craft is placing the emphasis on the object and
its qualities, to the exclusion of the personality of the artist, his unique
consciousness, his dilemmas. For instance, since Leonardo, painters have
consciously made use of accident to arouse suggestions that would either
help them to begin a painting or to redirect it during its creations.
Certain effects of accident in modern art-splashes, runs, etc.-are now
used by potters to enhance their surfaces. The accident is induced for
the sake of what it does to the appearance of the object, rather than
as an element in the artist's thinking and feeling: it becomes a category of
decoration and a technical device. But painters in the last few years have
also been using accident in the same way, that is, not as part of a
searching or imagining effort but in order to obtain a certain look. With
the intellectual-emotional motive eliminated, so is the difference between
the painter and the potter.
There is nothing in art that cannot be reduced to inconsequence
if understood in how-to-do-it terms. Like accident, "painterliness" ceases
to be a virtue in the hands of a recipe reader. But by the same token
so does non-painterliness. Feeble painting can be done in pigment an
inch think or in a wash as thin as the reasoning of certain art critics.
Today, in connection with Pop and Gag art and various kinds of
pattern-making abstraction in painting, there is much talk of an "anony–
mous" approach to art. This "new" idea reasserts the aboriginal relation
of the craftsman to his product, a relation of skill in making an object for
use. Under present-day conditions anonymous art can be nothing else
than a euphemism for commercial or industrial art brought into cultural
areaS formerly occupied by serious work. Art of the anonymous type,
and the attitudes that produce it, may be expected to appear under any
social conditions that provide a market for visual novelty and ornament.
The link of art with the crafts will persist no doubt as a force in
art criticism and education. Regardless of its mode of creation, any work
of art, even the most eXpressive or exploratory, can be interpreted as a
fabrication and judged in terms of the recipes by which it achieves its
effects. Criticism seems to be much slower than art itself in casting off
the spell of Greek and Latin terms that identify the poetry and the
artist with making and the maker.
The merger of the studio and the workshop goes back to the
begin-
