Friday, December 23, 2011

Kinds of Art or Craft

I write, I play music, and I make pottery.
A lot of my writing is translation, which is not a creative art, a lot of my music-making is playing the notes that other people have written, which is also, in a way, closer to a craft than to an art, and there's no question that making bowls and cups out of clay is a craft, not an art.
Of course the boundary between art and craft is fuzzy.  Every art has an element of skill, or craft in it, and every craft has an expressive potential.
Writing is abstract.  Sometimes I write with a pen on paper in notebooks, but the writing isn't the words in my handwriting on those specific pieces of paper.  Presumably, some time or other, I might transcribe what I've written by hand, and the writing will be embodied (or disembodied) as electronic code, and then, perhaps, printed on other pieces of paper.
Music making is transitory.  You play something, and it exists for the time that you play it, and in the memory of the people who heard it.
Though of course there is written music, directions to musicians that will enable them to play something, and there is recorded music.  Both of those have something in common with writing, but I still think that the essence of music is unique, live performance.
In contrast to writing (or written or recorded musics), which can be endlessly duplicated and still retain its essence, each piece of pottery is unique, and pottery is solid.  A cup that I made could last for another 6,000 years if it's buried in the right place!
Philosophers of aesthetics strive to figure out what these three forms of expression (along with many others like paintings, photographs, films, plays, or dances) have in common, but their ideas might not matter either to practitioners or to audiences.

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