Hierarchies of Medium: Ceramics & Craft
Redefining the Art Historical Canon
Ceramics have historically been excluded from “high art”, or, one might say, Art with a capital “A”, due to a centuries old binary that separated art from craft. In contrast to “fine art”, such as painting, which are created to solely be looked at and contemplated, ceramics, such as cups, plates and vases are tied to everyday utilitarian purposes.
Today, one might find ceramics in the Ancient Greek section of a museum, but contemporary ceramicists still struggle to break out of the pejorative label of “applied” “decorative” artists. It is time to free ourselves of such baseless assumptions.
Furthermore, as a tactile, craft-based medium, ceramics have been linked to domestic labor. In Western culture, this caused the medium to be disproportionately associated with women and indigenous practices, and thus devalued.
Art historian Linda Nochlin, in her renowned essay “Why Have there Been No Great Women Artists?”, tells us:
“In the field of art history, the white Western male viewpoint, unconsciously accepted as the viewpoint of the art historian, may - and does - prove to be inadequate not merely on moral and ethical grounds, or because it is elitist, but on purely intellectual ones. In revealing the failure of much academic art history, and a great deal of history in general, to take account of the unacknowledged value system, the very presence of an intruding subject in historical investigation, the feminist critique at the same time lays bare its conceptual smugness, its meta-historical naivete.”
Hierarchies in art cannot be broken down in a day, but one can start this process by simply looking at the works a little differently. Ceramics are a language of form that can permeate and beautify the everyday.
By reconsidering the status of ceramics, we can gain a deeper understanding of how artistic value is constructed and who has historically been excluded from its definition.