Thinking Through Craft

by Adamson, Glenn

• ISBN13: 9781845206475
• ISBN10: 1845206479
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-12-15
• Publisher: Berg Pub Ltd

Summary

Co-published in Association with the Victoria and Albert Museum, London This book is a timely and engaging introduction to the way that artists working in all media think about craft. Workmanship is key to today's visual arts, when high 'production values' are becoming increasingly commonplace. Yet craft's centrality to contemporary art has received little serious attention from critics and historians. Dispensing with clichéd arguments that craft is art, Adamson persuasively makes a case for defining craft in a more nuanced fashion. The interesting thing about craft, he argues, is that it is perceived to be 'inferior' to art. The book consists of an overview of various aspects of this second-class identity - supplementarity, sensuality, skill, the pastoral, and the amateur. It also provides historical case studies analysing craft's role in a variety of disciplines, including architecture, design, contemporary art, and the crafts themselves. Thinking Through Craft will be essential reading for anyone interested in craft or the broader visual arts.

Author Biography

Glenn Adamson is Deputy Head of Research and Head of Graduate Studies at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he leads a graduate program in the History of Design. He holds degrees in Art History from Cornell University (BA) and from Yale University (PhD). Dr. Adamson was previously curator at the Chipstone Foundation, and in that capacity prepared exhibitions at the Milwaukee Art Museum and taught Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the co-editor (with Tanya Harrod and Edward S. Cooke, Jr.) of the Journal of Modern Craft, the only academic journal in the subject area, which will launch in March 2008.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Preface

The Tracking Shot in Kapo

Cine-biography

Cinema and History

Travelling Cinephile

A Night in Ronda

Cinema Would be the Promise of the World

Cinema and Communism: In Defense of a Counter Society

Experience: From Cahiers to LibTration

Cinema and Television: Departure and Return

The Two Cinemas

Notes

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.