Craft matters.

In recent decades, the subject of craft all but disappeared from criticism and theory on contemporary art. As a result, the dialogue between form and content lost its balance. If art is as much a question of form as content, shouldn't we, in the art world, care about artists' facility with both? Moreover, whether or not we value craft as a principle of artistic development has profound social and ethical implications. For instance, it affects the status of artistic assistants with specialized expertise and skills. For artists, it determines their acquisition of what I will call the empathic dimension of creativity.

In this essay, craft refers to artists' depth of involvement with their media over time (not to a category or aspect of works). Among today's artists, I will consider two main types of engagements with media: craft-based and concept-based. Craft-based artists demonstrate commitment to exploring the possibilities of one medium or a very limited number of media. They would be a Barbara Kruger, a Doug Aitken, a William Kentridge, an Annie Sprinkle, or the late Dondi (White). Kruger has developed a hybrid medium out of language and graphic layout. Aitken has predominantly combined film or video with built environments. The intersection of drawing and animation has been central for Kentridge, while Sprinkle has consistently pushed the envelope of pornographic video and live performance. Until his untimely death. Dondi manipulated spray paint techniques rooted in the graffito tradition.

Most of these examples may seem odd. Perhaps they do not immediately spring to mind as examples of craftsmanship. In part, this is due to an outmoded concept of craft. We inherit the Renaissance association of craft with workshop traditions, as in the medieval guilds, which had established materials and techniques that were passed down from master to apprentice. Yet this traditionalist idea of craft does not jibe with contemporary ways of defining artistic media. Many modern and contemporary artists have charted new territories by adopting idiosyncratic hybrids. They have combined two or more existing media, sometimes as disparate as photography and architecture. Artists developing compound media do not necessarily exploit the possibilities of component media. Instead, they focus on problems peculiar to their medium intersection. Since these new compounds may not have established traditions and masters, they may not be readily identified as media, and thus, as involving craft.

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And yet, Kruger et al., like all craft-based artists, share a certain developmental approach. Their media are givens, a prioris underlying the conception of individual works. The artists' creative development goes hand in hand with their exploration of those media's potentialities. Kruger extended the possibilities of combining language with layout from pictorial to architectural arenas. As Dondi moved from subway-train painting to picture making, he elaborated his range of line and color effects in spray paint.

It may seem that medium, as applied to Sprinkle, is used too loosely here. However, in all of these examples "medium" refers to formal manifestation. This encompasses both methods and materials. Materials can be physical structures, such as paper and video, but in today's art world could just as well be the social environments of institutions and businesses, such as advertising. They also could be cultural genres, including pornography, which imply certain conventions of method and format.

For the most part, my definition of medium follows Rosalind Krauss's attempt to recast the concept in A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (1999). Rejecting Clement Greenberg's idea of medium as simply a physical support, such as a canvas in painting, she insists that media include a "layering of conventions." Krauss acknowledges that reference to media necessarily implies reference to methods--for example, the techniques of painting and not just painting's physical support. In addition, she rightly admits the inherent irreducibility of all media. All are combinations of other media and thus, necessarily impure. Unlike Krauss, however, I emphasize formal manifestation. I would not consider a theme or perceptual mode, such as Krauss's example of "opticality" in the sixties, to be a medium.

Despite their craft-based approach, not one of the artists mentioned above gained prominence primarily on the basis of craft. This is true of so many craft-based artists who have emerged since the mid-seventies. Given craft's medieval associations as well as its low priority in recent art dialogue, the currency of such artists has rested on other criteria. It was Kruger's relevance to postmodernism theory of the eighties, and it was Aitken's and Kentridge's applicability to the local/global thematic of the nineties, for example, that made them count. Their exploration of medium possibilities could be appreciated in monographic contexts, but found no place in broader critical dialogues on contemporary art.

The near silence surrounding contemporary art's craft-based dimension is not due solely to obsolete notions of craft. To be sure, the proliferation of concept-based practices has itself played a role. Concept-based artists tend to float from medium to medium, refusing specialization and letting ideas determine the materials and techniques for individual works. In the absence of medium specialization, concept-based artists may outsource to others who are competent in the chosen media; alternatively, they may choose means of expression that require no specialized training. Sherrie Levine, Rikrit Tiravanija, Damien Hirst, Jana Sterbak, and Maurizio Cattelan have employed these methods in varying proportions.

In Work Ethic (2003). Helen Molesworth deftly surveys the multiplication of artistic approaches that unsettled prevailing definitions of artistic labor and laid the foundations of what I am calling the concept-based approach. These include Marcel Duchamp's readymades and the influence of Duchamp in the fifties on such luminaries as John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg. The managerial role of the artist and the penchant for outsourcing in Minimalism has made an undeniable impact as well. Molesworth also mentions Fluxus and Conceptual Art, since these movements emphasized viewer participation and non-trained methods Considering cultural theory she notes artists enthusiastic reception of texts by Duchamp (1957) and Roland Barthes (1967). These undermined the ideal of authorial control over meaning--and, by extension, the value of craftsmanship.

Such developments had enormous influence on subsequent generations of artists. How unsurprising it is today when artists outsource and adopt the nomadic approach to media. Whereas these ways of working used to be localized within cultural movements that made an ideological point of them (as above), they are now conventional options, likely to be used by artists of whatever stylistic and political stamp.

Outsourcing and the avoidance of medium specialization might not have become so normalized, however, without the support of museums. Unwittingly, these institutions have come to consistently reward artists who are dependent on the know-how of others. It is now standard practice for major museums to burden themselves with a wide variety of fabrication responsibilities. They often purchase and have staff assemble materials and equipment that artists require but may not be well versed in. Many artists have grown accustomed to the benefits of preparatory staffs' knowledge and handiwork.

The museum's increased participation in art fabrication is in part a desirable adaptation to newer forms of art--like the paper-stack or candy works by the late Felix Gonzalez-Torres--that blur the roles of creator, custodian, and audience. And it seems downright practical in the case of site-contingent art. yet it is also the case that the expectation of such support makes it easier for artists in high demand by curators to take advantage of museums' readiness to compensate for artists' lack of craftsmanship. It encourages them to conceive of projects that utilize either museum staffs' know-how or the museums' budgetary support for the provision of external expertise. In my own curatorial experience at the end of the nineties. I noted the frequency of these occurrences. A typical example: for the assembly of a Jana Sterbak sculpture involving 300 pounds of flank steak and a chair-shaped armature, the museum paid not only for materials but for the services of a butcher and an upholsterer that were vital to its construction.

It is important to recognize that craft-based artists frequently also use assistants and other museum resources. The difference, however, is that such artists tend to use other laborers only to carry out projecis too large or complex to execute alone physically. They do not employ people to compensate for missing expertise in media that are central to the work. For instance, Kruger may employ others to construct large-scale installations. yet she takes responsibility for all of the crucial aesthetic decisions that will be credited to her. (This is not to say, however, that craft-based artists are not capable of taking questionable advantage of museum resources in other ways.)

The indifference to matters of craft in art criticism and theory is a fairly recent phenomenon. It is an unintended by-product of the shift from a critical discourse centered on the evaluation of formal quality and innovation to one preoccupied with cultural politics. The change in art writing occurred in two stages. The first came during the late 1960s. The proliferation of "intermedia" art finally broke down Clement Greenberg's idea that art should concern itself solely with the properties essential to its medium, along with his conviction that media can be purified. Concurrently, criticism began to focus on socio-political issues. The advent of identity politics and counter-cultural resistance to art as commodity galvanized critics' identification of progressiveness in art with progressiveness in socio-political content. Conceptual, feminist, performance, and activist art forms were all championed along these lines by critics and artists writing as critics.

Even then, however, many artists and critics maintained a rigorous dialogue on form, probing phenomenological and epistemological variables affecting meaning and experience and the very definition of art. For example, concern with set and information theory, and with fields such as psychology and linguistics, among Conceptual Artists and their advocates was formalist in a new, expanded sense without being formalist in the unsustainably reductive Greenbergian sense.

It was not until the eighties that art criticism lost interest in evaluating formal innovation. Enter postmodernist criticism, in which form was interesting only insofar as its political correctness could be judged. This phase was followed by a predominantly thematic focus in the nineties on multiculturalism and local and global filters of identity. Although these developments have had positive effects, expanding the dimensions of art criticism to include responsiveness to societal changes, they also unfortunately helped to marginalize craft.

I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that there is much to value in the concept-based approach. It is that which most radically questions established ways of defining and doing things, especially what it means to be an artist. This questioning of fundamental assumptions is indispensable to creativity in any sphere. The concept-based approach also upholds the useful ideal of maximum flexibility in solving a problem. It can lead to more resourceful solutions than the craft-based, which habitually assumes the use of a particular medium. It is just such a flexible approach that allowed Vito Acconci to start out as a poet and wind up an industrial designer. I admire Acconci's creative flexibility in addressing problems of communication, and want to see more concept-based artists like him flourish.

But the aggregate effect of art-world-wide indifference to craft is dangerous. It devalues people who invest time and other resources into learning how to do specialized work. The implied hierarchy of intellect over craft is fallacious in principle, since form and content are never separate in art. It is also often ethically suspect in the practice of concept-based artists, particularly when those lacking in such skills do not adequately credit those who have them and on whom they rely to realize their works.

To consider the socio-political implications of contemporary devaluations of craft, it is worth noting an historical irony; the twentieth-century distinction between craft and intellectual values in art emerged most directly out of aspects of Dada, Surrealism, and other iconoclastic threads of the avant-garde that disparaged the ideal of good craftsmanship as "bourgeois," Now, however, it is the dismissal of craft that likens many artists and critics to the socio-political equivalent of bourgeoisie in our time--corporate culture. Since the early seventies, corporate culture has come to favor idea over manufacture. The first stage in business conceptualism was the growing tendency for corporations to outsource manufacture. Businesses both adjusted to and helped produce quicker changes in consumer fashion by producing goods in smaller batches for shorter periods. This new "economy of scope," as historian David Harvey describes it in The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), made having factories set up to mass-manufacture goods with specific equipment cumbersome and uneconomical and subcontracting much more efficient. The next phase began in the mid-eighties with the birth of branding, which became the goal of the most profitable corporations in the nineties. Branding meant that businesses redefined their core function around the production of concepts and images, not products. The manufacture of ever-changing lines of products could be outsourced at the cheapest internationally going rate, inevitably found where no regard for craft is exercised in suppressions of labor rights. With business as concept-based as art, art can no longer claim ideological superiority to the corporate culture it historically spumed; this notwithstanding those instances of art (as in some of Hans Haacke's work) that try to challenge corporations in other ways.

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At the level of individual creative process, I would argue that there is an ethical trade-off to the concept-based approach. In exchange for the freedom of flexibility, the concept-based artist gives up the development of what I will call the empathic dimension of creativity. By this, I mean the kind of artistic approach that requires an artist to develop, over time, attention to and respect for a material other than his or her ego, an empathy with another matter's distinct properties, laws, or conventions. A long-time activist artist develops a respect for his or her sphere of political activity because social institutions are sometimes obdurate, have their own logic, and require patience to render pliable. The long-time activist artist's empathic relation to his or her materials is not so different from that of other craftspeople, such as the sushi chef who gains a respect for fish and the knives and other tools of the trade. Developing the empathic dimension of creativity requires duration and intensity of engagement with particular media.

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While concept-based artists may have a depth of engagement with ideas, thought alone does not require the manipulation of external phenomena that forms the basis of artistic empathy. Such encounters involve media, and ideas are not media. So concept-based artists are not simply craft-based ones specializing in the "medium" of ideas. Furthermore, all art, by definition, involves manifestation of idea. I cannot think of a single artwork that does not take form, even if it is as ephemeral as lying in bed for twenty-two days (a Chris Burden performance), or as materially negligible as publication of a statement (Lawrence Weiner's work).

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Ultimately, both concept-based and craft-based approaches are desirable for the evolution of art and society as a whole. But they must be in systemic balance. The fact that craft-based practice still exists in such high proportion is testament to its much longer history. But tides could shift if indifference to matters of craft on the part of art-world gatekeepers continues.

How to encourage balance? The most immediately achievable, and arguably crucial, task is to develop a broad-based dialogue on both form and craft. To do so, however, today's formal criticism must transcend the medium specificity that rendered Greenberg's criticism irrelevant. Since there is no dominant medium in art today, making analyses of form broadly relevant may require two strategies. One would be discussing paradigm-shifting formal innovations by artists or groups of artists working in particular media-as Lev Manovich, Julian Stallabrass. Peter Lunenfeld, and others have been doing with regard to the Internet and digital worlds. The other method would be to take on broad aesthetic concerns that transcend individual media.

A certain corner of critics, most publishing through the Allworth Press, have recently initiated this project. One of the milestones has been Bill Beckley's publication of Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics (1998), which anthologizes essays by many--including Robert Morgan, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, and Dave Hickey--who have begun to carve out a dialogue on aesthetics relevant to contemporary practice. Also, Gilbert-Rolfe's Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (1999) and Morgan's The End of the Art World (1998) have helped us understand why issues of form might be suppressed in the art-world today. In other ways, Gilbert-Rolfe's analysis transcends medium specificity. He theorizes about the differential experience of space and time offered by painting as opposed to digital and photographic media. Also, he relates those different experiences to the mediation of space and time in today's popular electronic media.

Such critics offer places to start. It is also vital to debate criteria of formal quality in art alongside conceptual rigor. Concern with formal strength goes hand in hand with care for artists' development of their media's possibilities. Only in rare cases can an artist surpass prevailing exploitations of a medium without a sustained relationship with it. We must also ask: what constitutes development of facility in any medium? And can we identify general characteristics of excellence in art, even though cultural differences and historical change make it impossible to name universally great works of art? We need to at least face these questions, including whether or not the questions themselves are too primitive and should be qualified. Yet not to face them is to deny that we inevitably do make judgments about form when we propel certain artists to prominence and ignore others. Since we do, shouldn't we examine the foundations of these assessments? At present, the art world collectively makes many judgments about the cultural politics of artists. This means it tries to take politics seriously. Perhaps it is time it also took craft seriously.

ALISON PEARLMAN is professor of Art History and Cultural Theory at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA.