Q. You suggested that there might be ways to write about the object in use. How can we do that? I think even architecture criticism often doesn’t deal with the building in use; it deals with it as a kind of ideal form and not as it is experienced.

R.M. I’ve been thinking about that over the last couple of days and I don’t have any real answers, only suggestions that have occurred to me and each of them raises its own problems, but the interesting thing would be how we solve those problems. If we look back to William Morris, for example – at the beginning of the mid-nineteenth century [from whence we derive] some of our contemporary ideas about craft – the context then was in a domestic dwelling, with other objects in a domestic space. So, one possibility would be to go into domestic spaces and write about the object as it occurs in the life of the person who uses that object. Obviously that requires co-operation with the person in that space. It raises new ethical questions about criticism because it’s not a public space as is a gallery. You are not there by right as a member of the public. We can also look at the world of design where there are public spaces that have craft objects in them such as furniture and we can look at how they occur in that space. Design criticism has already to some extent had to deal with that question. We have to see whether we can put ourselves in those spaces and write in a critical mode about how those objects function there. Another approach is to take individual objects and to engage with them. If we are dealing with functional work, for example, why not engage with the work in a functional way, why not have tea with the teapot and the tea cups and write on the basis of that experience and not simply on a visual experience?

Q. Have you actually done that? Have you found writing outlets that will allow you to write in that way about those things?

R.M. I can’t say that that’s something I’ve undertaken; it’s in preparing for this panel that I’ve thought I should actually try to do that.

B.G. What happens is that you can be frustrated by some contemporary crafts that don’t give the opportunity for speaking in terms of functionality, and I think the issue of function versus a more fine arts attitude can be a frustration for writers. Sometimes you wish that there were more contemporary crafts on the cutting edge, crafts that actually could invite that kind of discourse. A lot of them, like Léopold Foulem’s work, which I admire a great deal, deliberately prevent that kind of discourse, and not always necessarily; sometimes it’s just a gesture of seriousness to make an object that could be functional deliberately non-functional.

M.K. I would like to make two apologies: One is for being an academic and for driving down the prices for freelance writers in this country, but secondly for being a philosopher and having been complicit in the continuing influence of Kant’s critique of judgment, which I have to say I keep coming back to again and again as these questions get played out. This question of utility versus other values is something I’m not sure we can settle here – in fact I doubt it. But, clearly this notion that disinterest is the mark of art and everything else falls into some other, often, if not always, subsidiary category, has a link with Kant’s critique of judgment. That defence of art spreads its influence throughout the West from that point in the late eighteenth century onwards. Interestingly, if you go back to premodern thinking about art, even in the West, you actually find a union of utility and beauty being defended by early modern and certainly ancient thinkers about the arts, including painting and sculpture. This is tangled up in historical and sociological issues about the creation of the modern gallery and the museum and so on. I agree, Robin, that the recognition of the historical status of those questions doesn’t simply (by virtue of being recognized) solve the problem. What it does give us is the ability to start seeing those structures as contingent rather than necessary and then we can go after them, in discourse and in other ways.

B.G. It’s worth pointing out that there are necessary disjunctions and structures as well, but it’s not that all distinctions are historical (that there are sensible distinctions and less sensible distinctions), distinctions come from the way the human mind is made among other things. The distinction between art and craft is a particularly contingent distinction.

R.M. It’s also important to remember that it’s contingent on a number of factors like class and gender, geocultural differences, et cetera ... and one of the very tricky things around this question of what you know about medium is that materiality is the most heavily defended boundary between craft and the visual arts, defended on the visual arts side, precisely because it’s a little slippery and the most easily evaporated of the differences. All the hallmarks concerned with medium in craft are also present in traditional visual art media, such as oil painting, bronze casting, carving and marble. Much of the reason why those [“fine art”] media resist being considered in the same way, or resist jewellery or fibre or clay being considered in the same way, is that they’re afraid of being demoted to craft. In craft discourse especially, [it’s been interesting to follow] the discourse around fibre, because feminist critical work over the last thirty years is challenging the intellectual hierarchy of different media. One of the consequences of where we are is that, as Janet noted, within contemporary visual arts all media are theoretically permissible, but only those media that have a history in the visual arts, like oil painting, bring all their history with them, as part of visual arts discourse. Someone working in the visual arts is expected to know the history of oil painting and bronze casting as media. They are not expected to know the history of clay or fibre, and in fact the people working in craft don’t know that history – fibre workers don’t know clay history and clay workers don’t know the history of fibre. That is why there is not a better developed clay discourse. Those histories of different media have to be introduced into the broader discourse of cultural activities.

Q. [to Blake Gopnik] When you said you had to argue to get your editors to treat craft in the same manner as art ... you have to argue with them but do you frame your piece in that way? Essentially what you read us was telling us, “Hey, look at this stuff, I bet you never thought it could do this,” so you were identifying jewellery interest as an exception or as a novelty. Does it have to be done that way, and isn’t that interest in the newness of the thing, isn’t that just playing up? It’s a newspaper, so it wants to have news, so it’s not dealing with connoisseurship or other ways of responding to the subtleties of an object rather than the news of its interest.

B.G. Yes and no. As I said, one of the messages I want my readers to go away with is actually that possibility of looking at jewellery as though it were visual art. So that was a very deliberate rhetorical structure.

Q. Couldn’t you just write about what was interesting? Couldn’t you just deal with it as though it were just as interesting as a painting?

B.G. There are lots of different goals you could have. Given the state of craft criticism, especially in popular media, it’s more important to me to talk about that as a phenomenon rather than saying anything in particular about these works of jewellery, which I did. I didn’t ignore that entirely, but I don’t care if my viewers agree or disagree or remember any of the single things I said. What matters to me is that they will go home and say, “Hey, you know what, you can take jewellery seriously!” So that’s what the piece is really. It’s not about the specifics here, it’s about that phenomenon.

Q. If you were dealing with a solo show, could you talk about a selection of jewellery objects in the visual terms of painting or sculpture?

B.G.“Could” in what sense? [Do you mean] would I be allowed to? I’d fight for it but I’m lucky that I work for a paper that gives me a lot of leeway. Sure I could and I’d like to believe that my readers would be willing, too. Here’s a good example: I wrote about the Japanese designer Kuramata and I couldn’t get it into the arts section; it had to go into the design section. Those kind of distinctions always come up, even though it was written with exactly the same kind of vocabulary and in the same general way as I’d write about fine art.

Q. Say you wrote about an interior design show, a great big trade show ... and the question is how much contemporary craft was in that show, and, if not, why not?

B.G. Maybe it was good that there weren’t any crafts in that [hypothetical] show for the simple reason that crafts, if they are going to distinguish themselves from design, should be really pushing the envelope, should be made in small quantities, should not be looking necessarily to be sold and therefore should be very, very expensive. How often do you see works of craft costing anything like what a work by a modest mid-career painter would go for? I think it’s a good thing for a craft when it’s very, very expensive, when it’s the product of having thrown out a whole lot of other objects that weren’t up to scratch, where the craftsperson is deliberately not courting the market, is really pushing things beyond what the market can bear. I think for many craftspeople trying to make a living is actually in the end unhealthy, in that they necessarily end up moderating their creativity because they want to be in shows like this popular design show.

Q. Is it possible to look at commerce as a means of distributing one’s ideas?

R.M. In answer to that, I’d like to disagree with Blake, to the extent that I wouldn’t want to say that craft should only be at this end of the spectrum. One of the reasons that craft is so interesting is the spectrum. For example, all the non-functional works like the Léopold Foulems are great to see in a gallery and reveal a lot of meaning there, but they reveal it because we have an experience of teapots and so, when we see a teapot that’s full of holes, we have a certain reaction to it. We are able to appreciate that meaning because we have a functional history as well. To say all crafts should be over here at the academic and intellectual end is to buy into that old class hierarchy of practices, that notion that gentlemen don’t get involved in trade and that only gentlemen are ultimately smart enough to engage in ideas. It’s interesting that a lot of visual artists in the last thirty years have gone in the other direction. People like Keith Haring, for example, or Barbara Kruger, who’ve produced objects intervening in popular culture, mass-produced objects, or intervened in ways that allow their work to be read by mass audiences. Craftspeople can use that kind of engagement. There are dangers in every kind of engagement. There are dangers in commercial markets and there are dangers in what I would call the academic market. It is not a matter of keeping out of either of them, it’s a matter of knowing what the dangers are and intervening in an intelligent way.

Q. Is there a relationship between the stratification of our our post-secondary educational institutions and the stratification of the art, craft and design fields?

M.K. Of course it’s absolutely true that certain kinds of discourse are valourized in certain kinds of institutions. I would be willing to make an argument as to why the university as an institution gives us a valuable discourse, despite whatever pathologies attend that project, and there are many. What I want to say in response is different altogether and maybe this is one of the misconceptions about the status that universities hold. They are not functionally reproducing themselves in terms of the students that are being processed by them any more, if they ever were. In other words there may be some kinds of self-congratulation amongst the academics within universities, but the students who are being acculturated within universities are not reproducing that self-congratulation. They are not becoming academic in that sense, they are not becoming scholars, for better or worse. In fact, what strikes me over and over again with respect to the question we’ve been discussing, is my students’ absolute lack of interest in the circumstances of production of anything that they encounter in the world. However, their degree of interest and connoisseurship about the surfaces of those products is amazing, and they have taught me a great deal about seeing the differences between a FUBU shirt and a Nike shirt. And believe me, that’s a crude distinction, there are far more subtle ones. At that level they have a discourse that is as subtle and as discriminating as anything you would hope to see. But this goes back to the larger point I was trying to make in the essay that I read. What is characteristic about our consumer culture (and this is why discussion of craft or design tends to slide into lifestyle features), what is typical of our experience is that the circumstances of production are uninteresting, because what we want are the tokens without any awareness of the types. In fact, the types have been erased as uninteresting – this is the triumph of the industrial model. So, as a first step we should be trying to get people who consume these products to attend to the circumstances of their production and to me that’s a question that is aesthetic, moral, political, cultural, social and on and on. I would like to see more of that discourse both inside and outside the universities.

R.M. I wanted to respond to Ron Shuebrook’s point because I think that it relates to the art [versus] craft debate as well, because the relationship between universities and colleges and the effort to perhaps erase differences between them is similar to the kind of dynamic that goes on between visual art and craft and sometimes corresponds with a historic association of colleges with trades. Colleges are where you learn trades, whereas universities are where you become intellectually trained. There is a strong impulse in our society to eliminate distinction, because often those distinctions represent class privilege. We are right to reject class privileges and we are right to question the basis of the distinction, but that doesn’t mean the best thing to do is to get rid of the distinctions, because a lot of babies get thrown out with a lot of bath water when that happens. For example, I don’t think it’s a good thing, the infection of universities by college models where we expect philosophy students to earn a living as freelance philosophers and if colleges don...