Today he's writing a book review of The Craftsman by Richard Sennett. It's an excellent review, but what caught me initially (as it was meant to) was the opening line:
“Craftsmanship… the desire to do a job well for its own sake.”
-Richard Sennett
Craftmanship is often a dirty word in art making (I'm not even going to broach the art/craft linguistic mire here) but it's always a high level of skill and care that transforms artmaking into Art. So why is the notion of craftsmanship overlooked in art training? I feel, working at an art institution that prides itself on having practicing professional artists as teachers, that craftsmanship is always implied but never demonstrated or emphasised; it's only brought out in the open when a student is absolutely unable to work it out for themselves and produces 'shoddy' work (or is unable to rationalise the shoddy work as 'art').
Any thoughts?
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I don't think we do pay enough attention to either skill acquisition or craftsmanship in a lot of training situations. There's an enormous amount of merit in encouraging people to use TAFE training to acquire skill before moving into tertiary courses (with APPROPRIATE advanced standing).
Skill allows the pushing materials & techniques; craftsmanship is for me not quite the same thing - it's inherently based on skill but it's more a knowing - pushing something to be able to express in its completed wholeness more than the sum of its parts.
One of the assumed benefits in having professional practitioners as teachers is that their work and process embodies this, but often the expected achievement of craftsmanship seems to rely on something akin to osmosis in the first instant, and appraisal and assessment in the second.
Improving skills and gaining craftsmanship of a high order does occur, (without active teaching) but is it more often through the act of repetition - doing something again & again? Practicing. Building & acquiring skills, and developing the sense of the whole? Then teaching becomes less... empirical? But presumably that is only possible if the skill base is there. Without skill, nothing can be done. But is art art without craftsmanship? And how do we pass the virus on?
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