First American Art Magazine No. 11, Summer 2016 | Page 12

Editor’s Greetings

and the experience it generated in audiences rather than the
quality of what was fashioned.3

Shiner, the philosophy and visual arts professor, writes:
FRIEND RECENTLY WROTE, “How is there
To elevate some genres to the spiritual status of fine art and
still a craft-versus-fine-art debate going on?”
their producers to heroic creators while relegating other
After she asked this, the terms kept coming up
genres to the status of mere utility and their producers to
in conversations, often with Native artists. Like
fabricators is more than a conceptual transformation … The
so many art terms, these words are simultaneously vague
genres and activities chosen for elevation and those chosen
and loaded with unspoken implications. Why would we use
for demotion reinforce race, class, and gender lines …4
language that cast our own
Berger explains, “Since
creations in a dim light?
cultures outside of the
Fine art has historically
West had never divorced
referred to nonutilitarian
aesthetics from utility, it was
art, and craft has referred to
easy for European Americans
functional art. However, the
to devalue even visually
implication has been that craft
alluring objects nonwhite
is less than fine art. Fine art is
peoples produced, given that
pure and driven by content,
such objects always served a
while craft focuses solely on
practical function.”5
materials and technique.
Women’s artwork in
This conceptual divide
particular has been singled
began in the late 18th century.
out as craft. In the late 1960s
“Art for art’s sake”—that visual
and 1970s, Feminist and Pop
art should have no utilitarian
artists directly confronted and
purpose—was proposed
overturned these prejudices.
by Prussian philosopher
The most exalted art
Immanuel Kant in his 1790
forms
within Indigenous
1
Critique of Judgment and
communities
are those that
echoed by many others in
have been labeled craft by
the following century. “ ‘The
historical
Western writers.
fine arts’ were those that fit
In
the
Andes,
textiles have
the aestheticist criteria of
been the highest regarded art
art for the sake of art and
medium for centuries, while
for the sake of nothing else,”
on the Northern Plains, quillwrites David E. W. Fenner.2
work was so highly regarded,
While the art world has
America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), Gunsmoke, 2011, fumage ( alo
the practice of the art form
opened up considerably in
Santo smoke) and acrylic on poplar panel, 14 × 11 in., private collection.
the last four decades, this
required membership to
his work pays homage to om hreepersons (Cherokee, 1889 19 9) and
Enlightenment-era philosophy his invention of the om hreepersons holster, still in use today.
exclusive societies and quilling
lingers in mainstream culture.
itself was carefully governed
Art historian Dr. Martin A. Berger sums up the situaby ceremonies. Tribes, such as the Kiowa Indian Tribe,
tion when he refers to philosopher/art theorist Larry Shiner’s
United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians, and Cherokee
point in The Invention of Art:
Nation, all designate their own master artists and promote
the art forms they most value. These include beadwork,
[Trace] our modern conception of art back to the
basketry, and other functional art forms.
eighteenth-century separation of the fine arts from crafts,
Conceptual meaning can be expressed in any art media,
of artists from artisans, and of aesthetic pleasure from
whether functional or not. If much of the global art world has
entertainment. These divisions broke a two-thousandmoved on from using these short-lived Western divisions, let
year-old Western convention that art was any activity
us do the same. Let us define our own art on our own terms.
practiced with skill and grace. In the modern West, art came
—America Meredith
to be defined by the product created, the person making it,

A

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3.
4.
5.

David E. W. Fenner, Art in Context: Understanding Aesthetic Value (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 7.
Ibid.
Martin A. Berger, A Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 99.
Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 7.
Martin A. Berger, A Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture, 100.

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