CMU School of Drama


Tuesday, February 11, 2014

The craftsmanship of a master is different from the elegance of an artist

My Soap Box: I was watching a documentary on the history of Sushi and this quote grabbed my attention. It started me thinking about if there is really a difference between craftsmanship and art.
I started doing some research into the history and definition of "craftsman". Aspiring master craftsman would have to go through a series of career steps until they could produce a "masterpiece" and present it to a jury to determine if they were in fact good enough to join the guild and be considered masters.

3 comments:

Sydney Remson said...

The title of this article interested me, but the article itself didn't quite live up to my expectations. Although the author began to bring up some interesting ideas, none of them were really developed into anything more than random musings. I also disagree with some of her terminology and definitions. For example, she wonders if because a master craftsman is making something with the utmost skill, is it automatically art? I would say no, and so does she, but her reasoning is not fully developed and displays a lack of understanding for what art is. She says that just because something is made skillfully that does not make it art because it may not be aesthetically pleasing. But art does not need to be aesthetically pleasing, art is about meaning. So while no, a craftsman's work is not automatically art, it has nothing to do with the fact that the work may not be pretty.

Thomas Ford said...

I agree with what Sydney says about the title of the article. I though it would something cool and insightful, but it was just the musings of someone based on a quote they heard in a documentary about sushi. Some of the points that the author brought up were interesting, and the article does make you think a bit, but in reality it says nothing. It asks a few questions then says "I dunno, oh well." The questions that the article did bring up though are cool, I only wish she had posed answers or ideas for them too. The questions reminded me of one that I like to think about a lot (especially during Susan projects) about what design is? Is there a line between art and design? What about functionality? Is it inaccurate to call the class basic design? Should it be called basic art? If that's the case, why not just call it arts and crafts? Rather than posing any answer to this, I am going to take a note from the author.

Adelaide Zhang said...

It's definitely a very interesting topic to think about, and while I agree that being an artist and being a master craftsman are slightly different, I don't think it's necessarily quite so simple. First off, all we're talking about here is definitions, and depending on how you want to define each word, you're going to get different results. For another thing, it seems to me that while different, artistry and craftsmanship are still very frequently connected. To be a truly good artist, you're probably going to have the skills of a craftsman, and to be a (successful) master craftsman, you probably also have the visual aesthetic skills of an artist.