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Both “Towards a Standard of Beauty” and “Art Verses Craft” examine crafts position within culture and the arts in the current day.  The biggest similarity between the two that I noticed is that they each encourage contemporary craft artists to be aware and considerate of the long history that their craft stems from. 

 

In “Towards a Standard of Beauty” a sort of revisionist history is talked about in which the Japan Folk craft Museum is created in order to correct the history of focusing on the “aristocracy and the great” rather than “ the great mass of the people” or “people themselves” when showing artwork.   The author recalls their experience of creating the museum and their reasons for doing so. 

 

Yanagi hopes that the craft museum will not only give viewers ideas for “enriching his own life” but give makers hints as to “what should be produced in the future”.  He argures that a factor which determines that a craftsman’s work will be good or bad is if they look at and are able to appreciate the craft of people who came before, therefore making Japanese craft available in a museum setting will promote the quality of future craft.  Yanagi calls craftspeople to action; he asks that they “ally themselves closely with the artisan, so that eventually we may have beauty in common things again”. 

 

I tend to question this idea that objects made now are less true than those made in the past.  Yanagi takes a pretty hopeless stance in suggesting that craftspeople are given the responsibility to save crafts from their current hopeless situation in which only false objects are being made.  In a history class I took we talked about this idea in relation to residential architecture.  In architecture it takes some perspective and time to judge what is quality; my history teachter talked about this with lement.  She feared the renovation and reconstruction of homes that were not in style at the moment, and wondered if these homes would one day come back in style or at least be seen with historical regard.  I sometimes think that craft can be the same way.  There are trends which come in and out and there is personal aesthetic preference. 

 

In Art Verses Craft, Nancy Salvage looks at what happens when a craftsman’s craft stops being necessary for basic survival  and their perspective changes.  The vessel form begins to become symbolic and decorative rather then entirely utilitarian,  She recalls a series of ceramic artists who did part from utilitarian ceramic craft such as Robert Arneson, Peter Volkuss, Pablo Picasso, and Marcel Duchamp.  They all did work that was not traditional but was informed by the history of craft.