art as craft

by R.G.Collingwood

The first of these things that is easily confused with art proper has the recommendation of having been espoused by Plato and Aristotle. This is the 'technical' theory of art, or the theory that art is craft, by which we mean a fully worked out theory of crafts such as watchmaking, joinery, carpentry and so on. In fact, the theory of craft, along with the thesis that art is not craft, suffices to show that art proper is a distinct activity from the other three things, by showing that they are essentially crafts.

The term 'craft' refers to activities which typically exemplify the following six characteristics; none are individually necessary, but the less of them that an activity exemplifies, the less sense there is in calling it a craft: (1) The applicability of a distinction amongst actions as means and actions as ends. A baker, for example, whips the egg whites in course of mixing the batter, for the eventual end of baking a cake. (2) A distinction is involved between planning and execution. A carpenter, for example, assembles bits of wood according to a plan for say a table, and for the most part, the more exact the plan, the better. (3) In planning, ends precede means in that the latter are chosen for the sake of the former, but in execution the means precede the end. (4) We can generally distinguish between raw material and finished product. (5) A distinction can be drawn been form and matter: the craft is transformation of the raw material into the finished product. (6) Crafts stand in three sorts of hierarchy: (a) The raw material of one craft is the finished product of another; for example the sawmill produces plywood, which is in turn the raw material for builders. (b) One craft has as its end product the tools which are employed as means in another. (c) Some trades work in concert to bring about the finished product; for example, the manufacture of a computer may involve separable manufacture of the chip, the hard disc, the monitor and so on, so that the final assembly is 'only the bringing together of these parts'.

The point is not that works of art never display any of these features; the point is that some works involve none, without its detracting from their status as art. Therefore the essence of art cannot have to do with any features correctly treated by a theory of craft. A pure case might be the poet for whom the poem simply comes to mind, unbidden, without its being written down or even said aloud. There is no distinction to be drawn between planning and execution in such a case, and none between actions as means and actions as ends. (If the poet had in mind something analogous to a blueprint for the poem, he would already have composed it.)

That takes care of (1)-(3), and (6) (a)-(c). What of (4)? It might be tempting to think of the words as the raw material, the poem as the finished product. But T. S. Eliot for example did not choose the words needed for The Wasteland and then proceed to arrange them into the poem. The poet can, however, be conceived as 'converting emotions into poems'; but this is 'a very different kind of thing' from, say, the pasta maker's conversion of flour into spaghetti. Collingwood simply leaves this point hanging, because it would require his own positive account of art as expression to explain it; that will come later. (He also neglects the possibility that the raw material of the poet is simply the language as a whole.)

Finally, the distinction between form and matter as it applies to art is not the sort required by (5). That distinction requires that the self-same matter be capable of having different forms placed upon it; if we cannot identify the matter in the first place, then the distinction cannot get a grip.

It bears repeating that the claim is not that no works of art have any craft-like features; it simply that any definition of art in terms of those features would exclude some unimpeachable works of art (29). Or rather, success in being craft is strictly immaterial to its being art; no craft-features make an object into a work of art. Collingwood is well aware that for example an opera requires a great deal of planning, technique, raw materials, and so on. And because of this, he is well aware that the craft-theory is widely if implicitly held, and devotes a lively excursus to its modern manifestation, namely 'Art as a Psychological Stimulus'. This is the account of art whereby it is the craft (or 'technique') of manipulating certain objects (paint, sound, words and on) so as to bring about psychological states in the audience, which in turn are known, or least knowable, in advance. But this is to assimilate works of art to mere means; Collingwood is quite serious in his denial of this. The artist is not 'a purveyor of drugs' (34).