Lecture delivered July 11 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Conjunction with the exhibition "Workshop of the World: Arts and Crafts in Philadelphia".
This is the short version. I was going to post the long version, but its less refined. If you really, really want it, let me know and I will see what I can do.
No pictures here--it was mostly illustrated with images of "Super/Natural" and other images I don't own the copyright to.
But here's one I made which illustrates the gist of my thesis (which, in a nutshell might be: craft vs art tends to break down on mind vs body lines, or management vs labor or sacred vs profane). Our species-wide body dysmorphia comes with a huge cost, not the least of which is climate collapse and extinction. So GET A GRIP HUMANS! Ok. now you don't have to read further.)
PART I. INTRO
Thank you so much for asking me to speak. I am honored and
excited to be here! I apologize in advance for the occasional scatological
metaphor.
A few words about the title “Make…Believe”. The other day I heard an expert on NPR, introduced as one of the world’s leading expert on
determining AI fakes. Apparently, the
fakes are becoming so good even he can’t tell.
And I was reminded that the age-old adage, “seeing is believing” is obsolete. “Make-believe”, referring to children’s games
of pretend, is such an odd combination of words. So many people have trouble with the immaterial
and abstract. They want to see to
believe. But if you want to up your
game: make to believe. I promise that you
will really, really believe in the things you make yourself!
About three years ago, I undertook a project which I
designed deliberately to be the most difficult and agonizing project of my
life. A goal which it admirably fulfilled! And I wanted to make it 99% by
myself. Why would I do this? Not to torture myself. Not to kill time. Not even
to prove it was possible. But maybe to prove that doing something crazy and
unnecessary like that is worth it. I can only show you the result and you can
decide if you agree. So, you will be seeing a lot of pictures of Super/Natural.
During this talk, I may use the words art and craft
interchangeably. Forgive me! I actually do not believe they are synonymous. At
this point I believe CRAFT is the superior modality, having cornered the market
on multi-millennium longevity, inclusivity, democracy, and universality—all
things Fine Art often lacks. Craft is usually seen as a subset of art—the
material and technical part. But I ask you to consider that Art is actually a
subcategory of CRAFT, invented by a fairly small group of European intellectuals,
patrons, and institutions with a specific agenda. I do not wish their troubles
on the CRAFT community, thank you very much.
Around 1990, I was attending an opening in New York when
someone asked me who fabricated my work. I said, “I do.” What I remember most
was the look of absolute shock and disbelief on the person's face. Clearly this
was not the answer they expected. Of course, I knew plenty of artists didn't
make their own work. But who did they think made it? As if those who actually
make things are not human beings, but invisible elves or mice, like in Beatrix
Potter's The Tailor of Gloucester. I have, at times, been mistaken for a
magician or a ditch digger, but rarely for myself—someone who learned something
and practiced it.
To this day, I notice people have a strange relationship
with craft. The classic example is your cell phone. It didn't spontaneously
generate. Yet how it came to be is beyond most of our capacity to imagine, let
alone do ourselves. It seems magical. The person who was surprised that I make
my own work felt some kind of awe. But, being an art-world insider, she had
also been taught that the end justifies the means, not the means the end. The
making part was subservient to the conceptual.
Among civilians who don't know better,
I often find the opposite. My work is valued because it looks like I spent a
lot of time and effort on it. And believe me, I most certainly did. It's as if
the effort itself reassures people I am not trying to get one over on them. They are happy that their child couldn’t
make it, to paraphrase the colloquial complaint about modern art. But I do not charge by the hour or by the pound. The value
of an artwork is not in the material, nor in the physical effort, nor even in
the physical object itself. Yet separating the thing from its making presumes a
separation between the “idea of a thing” and the thing itself.
Like the roots of the word suggest, craft has a dark side.
Crafty means suspicious. So, we often devalue process when we are not familiar
with it. Why is craft knowledge powerful, mysterious, and suspicious? Why is
process so often invisible? The answer is simple: specialization is convenient.
The less visible production becomes, the easier it is to ignore the people
doing it. We don't merely outsource labor; we increasingly view physicality
itself as inferior.
As for craft objects themselves, they are almost too
familiar. Ceramic bowls feed us. Wood chairs hold our butts. Fabric dresses
cover our naughty bits, more
ceramic bowls flush away our waste.. Better, perhaps, to
seek mystery in things that help us forget we have bodies. Craft suffers from
being caught between arcane knowledge and bodily function.
People say the divide between art and craft is over. (but I
don’t want it to be over! I want to
WIN!) Maybe only the most philistine would publicly sneer at craft now. But
what I see instead is fine artists "discovering" the artistic
potential of glass or clay and getting credit for it, while craftspeople remain
in the trenches. The bosses are still the same. We have been colonized, in
other words. In the end, either you value the handmade or you don't. I would
suggest that not valuing the handmade is a form of species dysmorphia that
begins with mechanization and ends, perhaps, with AI. It's the ultimate
concession to the Cartesian mind/body split.
We often hate our bodies. We overvalue the contents of our
brains. We strive to widen the gap between body and soul as if someday we can
be all light and no poop. But this has consequences. Imagine your body as
lesser, and all physical bodies—including the planet—become exploitable,
dominated, commodified, and ultimately subjugated. The implications seem to be
our irrelevance, or even extinction. Speed, convenience, scalability, and
apathy are the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
And no, I have no solutions to offer. I am only suggesting
that we pay attention to what disappears when making disappears. And since I
don't want to be a total bummer, I will say maybe—just maybe—we can correct our
course on our own. With help perhaps from a meteor strike or super-volcano
eruption.
PART II. CRAFT HISTORY
My first memory is of drapes. I was lying in bed looking at
folds in the curtains which distorted what I guess was a floral pattern. I saw
terrifying monsters. I knew then the power of the decorative arts. Later, I
drew my mother a picture. "What a lovely picture of an angel!" she
said. "It's a carpet," I replied. Later I stared at bathroom tiles
for hours, admiring scenes of capsizing ships in horrendous storms at sea. Thus,
a future craftsperson was born.
I attended Rhode Island School
of Design (RISD) in the early 1980’s. At RISD, my instructors, the generation
before me had faced the stigma of Craft—lower prices and lower prestige. They
taught us in the glass program to always identify ourselves as “artists’ and
never, ever as “craftsmen” (as was the gender convention back then). No
one but the most ignorant hobbyist would call themselves a “glass artist”! I don’t think they intended to do so, but
they taught me to be ashamed of craft.
It took years to understand
the forces of history behind this. I
arrived in art school, a fresh faced naif with visions of making pretty
pictures unaware that certain categories—the decorative, the beautiful, the ornamental,
and sometimes the well-made had been in disrepute for about a century. (I would
have been happy to make art to match your sofa!) Clement Greenberg had declared
that “all profoundly original art looks ugly at first” and we all understood
immediately that making ugly things was the path to guaranteed profundity.
Hooray!
At the time, I was happy
beauty was abolished from art. Because I felt ugly myself, I truly enjoyed
making ugly and shocking things and making people look at them. I was also a poor craftsperson. I delighted in telling my teachers, as the
work shed glass parts during crits, that technique didn’t matter because I was conceptual.
In 1983, I moved to
Philadelphia and by 1993 was teaching at University of the Arts with Sharon
Church, Rod McCormick, James Makins, MiKyoung Lee and SO MANY others. Our
primary task seemed to be arguing for the value of Craft, usually with some
Ruskin-esque defense, which no one really cares about. But my colleagues were
absolutely passionate about their practice, and they certainly weren’t about to
apologize for it. They taught me that craft had intelligence, history, dignity,
and humanity. They taught me that craft was an ethos as capable of enlightenment
as any other art form. They taught me to be proud of being a craftsperson. And here I stand today—intensely grateful for
their gift and intensely proud to be a craftsperson, dare I say: a GLASS
ARTIST. And yes, with 45 years of experience I am pleased to tell you my
technique has improved.
As you all know, UArts
abruptly shut its doors in 2024. Before that, during COVID, it ended the Crafts
Program. In doing so, it harmed Philadelphia's legacy as a center of craft. There
are no words to express my devastation and rage at this violent and unthinking
act.
Philadelphia's fine craft culture stretches back to the
1876 Centennial Exposition and continued through the Arts and Crafts movement,
the studio craft movement, and institutions such as Helen Drutt Gallery,
Snyderman/Works, The Clay Studio, The Fabric Workshop, The Center for Art in
Wood, Tyler, Moore, and UArts itself.
What distinguished Philadelphia was not any single medium
but a continuous culture of making. As argued in Craft Capital, that
culture remains one of the city's defining characteristics.
On a personal note, I moved here because I had a boyfriend
here. How incredibly fortuitous for me. I had no idea of this history at the
time and probably wouldn't have cared. Yet my career would not have been
possible without this coincidence, and I am profoundly grateful to have landed
here.
PART III. WHAT'S PLEASURE GOT TO DO
WITH IT?
It's understandable, in hindsight, that twentieth-century
artists feared craft's mighty power. To further understand why craft was
disparaged, we have to look at the intersection of beauty and skill.
SKILL: Who has the time,
determination, or money to learn a skill? Why bother in the face of
mechanization, or now AI? Skill can seem classist, unfair, and exclusionary.
Not everyone can learn a skill, and sometimes otherwise brilliant artists
actually can't paint their way out of a paper bag. In a culture increasingly
interested in ideas, skilled mastery can look less like an achievement and more
like showing off.
At some point, around the time Duchamp exhibited his
urinal, skill got demoted. It became the muscles or the labor. Concept—that
dematerialized, idealized fluffy cloud of ether—became the brains, the BOSS if
you will, and ne'er the twain shall meet.
But we're so ambivalent as a culture. We want everyone to
have a white-collar career. We want our children to grow up to be Duchamps
exhibiting urinals, not plumbers installing actual urinals. Yet we really hate
it when the toilet breaks or something is assembled poorly. For what it's
worth, we also expect our athletes not to engage in sloppy sports. Go Birds!
So, when I think about how deskilling happened in art
school, I am grateful I am not required to paint Classical French Academy
style, but I also think denigrating skill is another manifestation of our
discomfort with physical labor. And that it comes with hidden costs we
may not wish to pay.
As for me, even when I wasn't skilled, I had the decency to
be embarrassed by that in private. Work that falls apart doesn't sell well
until you are a huge name like Julian Schnabel. Then you can get away with such
shenanigans.
Art school pretends monetary value doesn't matter, which is
a legacy of serving an aristocratic class of independently wealthy students who
can afford not to sell their work. That they foist this off as "the life
of the mind" is another insult steeped in mind/body dysmorphia. One reason
it was such a tragedy when the UArts Craft Program died is that it was one
place that truly integrated skill and concept into a single pedagogy.
Skill in my work manifests in stained glass technique. It
was gruesomely uncool to aspire to be a glass artist when I was at RISD, but to
tell you the truth, I found the idea of pioneering new techniques really
exciting. I could see that stained glass had been radically underexplored, and
I was eager to dive right in and bring some new ideas to the table.
BEAUTY:
Craft interests me most when it includes ornamentation,
which I see as an effort to embellish—to make something beautiful beyond what
its function requires. I have always been absolutely obsessed with
ornamentation and beauty despite the best efforts of my Modernist professors.
I should probably define beauty before going on. My recipe
for creating beauty—and this is just me—is to use the measurable aspects of
design that can be pretty: composition, color, harmony, luminosity, and so
forth, and then add some death. If you want more information, ask me later.
Beauty became suspect for a lot of reasons. It's hard to
say "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" when you're looking at newsreels
of war and poverty. Advertising co-opted beauty to manipulate desire for
profit. Women got wise to the oppression of the beauty industry, and others got
wise to historical standards of beauty as reaffirming status, elitism,
capitalism, and patriarchy. Beauty came to seem frivolous, dishonest, and
politically compromised. Off with its head!
But I knew how important beauty was because I am female and
had been fed a steady diet of messages reminding me that my value was more or
less solely in my appearance. I realize now that not worrying about how pretty
something is a male privilege. Back then I had the sense to realize it didn't
matter what my male professors said about beauty—it was clearly of critical
importance.
As mentioned, I enjoyed making ugly, unsettling, creepy
things and getting people to look at them. But at some point, my work shifted
toward depicting ugly, treacherous, or uncomfortable thoughts as sumptuously
beautiful images. Not only could stained glass transform me into a swan, but it
could also transform ugly feelings into something more palatable.
For many years my work centered on transforming the
wretched into the beautiful—unspeakable grief, unbearable sentimentality, or
nerve-wracking ambivalence—and representing it in such a way that it became
inviting and safe to contemplate. I am at one with those who believe art is a
way of feeling one's feelings in a deeper, more poignant way. And I am not
above believing that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.
At this point I think my work became a version of doll play
and art became my proxy. I learned I could seduce people with dazzling art
instead of my face and body. The characters I depicted weren't
self-portraits—just externalized vessels for my feelings and a way to put
forward an improved version of myself that wasn't a total lie.
CRAFT:
Craft, ornament, and decoration were caught in the
crossfire of the Modernist dilemma because they are associated with both beauty
and skill. More importantly, they are associated with physical pleasure. They
have all been accused of seduction, manipulation, superficiality, spiritual
bankruptcy, dishonesty, elitism, and wasting precious resources. What they have
in common is that they create pleasure, and we can be deeply suspicious of
pleasure.
The more we desire pleasure, the more we fear being
deprived of it. Physical pleasure is entangled with our most vital longings—for
connection, meaning, love, and belonging. Because these things make us
vulnerable, we often reject pleasure in advance. We relegate beauty and
ornament to the realm of the superficial and congratulate ourselves for our
seriousness. Best to say it's in the eye of the beholder and be done with it.
Best to say ORNAMENT IS CRIME.
And what does that prove? Does banishing pleasure in the
form of beauty really make us better students or citizens? Does it make us more
spiritual? Did getting rid of the decorative finally liberate artists from the
need to match the sofa? Did it finally prove artists were profoundly serious?
Did it make men feel manlier to put down domestic arts? Yeah, I didn't think
so.
Hating physical pleasure doesn't eradicate the need for it.
It merely sends it underground. To claim that pleasure is incapable
of meaning is to commit to a philosophy of austerity on the false premise
that bodies are easiest to deal with
when denied. One step closer to
dehumanization.
To claim that pleasure is incapable of meaning is to ignore the overwhelming evidence that ornament isn't
a class privilege—it's a human instinct. Across all cultures, people embellish
beyond necessity. It's how we make things matter more by making them special.
Take that, Oliver Cromwell, Adolf Loos, and Clement
Greenberg.
PART IV. NEVER MIND THE HUBRIS, HERE'S JUDITH SCHAECHTER!!
For the last third of this talk, I want to make a feeble
case for why hand work matters in the time of mechanization and AI. So much has
been said about AI. You know the rap: it takes jobs away from artists, it
produces slop, AI has no soul so how can it make art that speaks to human
souls?
To be honest, most people can't tell the difference between
AI-generated stuff and human-made—or soon won't be able to—and worse, they
don't really care as consumers. Walter Benjamin was wrong. Aura can be
effectively simulated. But of course, that doesn't mean it should be. Why
purposely contribute to the irrelevant-ification of people in the name of
money?
It pays, I think, to look at an artist's process. If you
think the first step is that "they have an idea," then you may not
realize you are enabling technologies like AI. Because if the idea is
paramount, then it doesn't matter who makes it and making itself is merely
labor. The head wins, you might as well go upload your consciousness to a hard
drive. All poop, vanquished. Well done. Say hello to your robot overlords!
As a craftsperson, as a product of the UArts Crafts program
(even if I wasn't a student there), I learned that the idea comes in concert
with the making. Not before, not after, but alongside. It is my personal belief
that this is the BEST way.
As an artist working in a two-dimensional medium, my work
begins with drawing. All modes of drawing have been going the way of the
dinosaur for many decades, long before AI. This is bad. So bad. Most artists
don't draw anymore. Most art sucks. I think these things are connected. It's
not that they can’t render realistic figures, it’s that they can’t THINK
visually! Drawing is manifesting thought materially. It is a way of thinking. Think of the word itself which also means “to
pull”—like a “horse0drawn carriage”. To
draw is to pull stuff out of your brain and make it materially manifest. But it’s even more than that!
Something happened to me as a young artist struggling with
drawing that I would describe as "I found my artistic voice."
Learning to draw was synonymous with learning what was uniquely mine. I truly
can't see anything from my head until I am watching it appear, in real time,
coming out of my hand onto a sketchbook page.
So, in drawing I am pulling my SELF out of isolation and into the real
world.
And this is what creation means: to make something that
wasn't there before, something I didn't even conceive of before. You can
draw out an idea or you can have an idea and then draw it. They won't be the
same image. So, I don't see how an idea is particularly helpful. It's often
just a bunch of prejudice prior to investigation.
I have taught in art schools for 34 years, and students
often tell me they can't draw. Funny—neither could I when I arrived at RISD. My
students, though, trace Google image searches and effectively prevent
themselves from ever learning how to draw. I, on the other hand, did learn to
draw. I found out something startling: anything you practice you get better at.
EVERYTHING. But you gotta practice.
This is why work
made by someone other than the artist is different. Not that you will know,
because you can't see what would-have-been next to what did get made, but I
assure you, you get two very different results. A lot of meaning—maybe most of
it—arises during the making, avoiding the traps of intention, which is often
ego-based and dreadfully boring. Work made to match an intention is often
stilted and bloodless. Work responding to its own creation is alive with
unpredictable energy and inspiration. It seems more in dialogue with life
rather than delivering a lecture.
AI assumes ideas matter more than making. Craft teaches
that meaning emerges through making. Drawing is simply a clear example of this.
It is very clear to me personally that hand work, including
drawing from my own imagination, has saved my life. So why can't it save
everyone?
PART V. CRAFT AS A DEVOTIONAL ACT
AI doesn't care about you, but you may not notice. That
strikes me as a complete tragedy. Because art can care for you. Craft,
especially, cares for you.
Craft is all about caring. And the only way to prove caring
is to set our needs aside and put others ahead of us. That's why a cheap broken
toilet is such an insult. Someone didn't care enough about you to make it
right. Ouch.
There are many ways to go about making an art project. But
it was, and usually is, my intention to go about it in the most difficult and
agonizing way possible. Here's why.
Until recently, whenever I heard the
expression "labor of love", I assumed that meant the person doing the
labor loved, or at least enjoyed, the process itself. I thought
they were talking about INTRINSIC REWARD.
Now, owing to over 40 years of
personal experience, I think it means something else. I think it means
the maker loves YOU. I mean, that's what I mean when I say my work is a
labor of love. I do like doing it...sometimes. My love
for glass and glass process is the kind of love that also includes struggle,
conflict, boredom, frustration and even hate. It may be enjoyable at
times, but not always. But when all's said and done it's not really about
that.
It clicked for me when someone told me their "love language" was cooking.
And I realized my "love
language" was my art. I
somehow understood it was the best way for me to express my love for
others. Better than talking, better than sex, better than ANYTHING.
For me, to make a work of art is to love.
And that said, the reason for the
labor intensity should be obvious. I cannot work hard enough to love and
there is no length too far to aim for.
It's my deeply held belief that extreme labor intensity can
be an act of devotion—not to one's own intentions, but to the idea that care in
the act of making still has value in this age of mechanical reproduction and,
ultimately, Artificial Intelligence. I worry that what we're capable of
creating as humans is being neglected. I worry that the commitment of time and
energy is seen as wasteful when there are more efficient and convenient
methods.
I wanted the dome to be an example of what's possible with
just hands, brains, passion, and time (and yes, money, sadly enough)—to prove
that there is value in the sacrifice of efficiency and convenience. Much like
religious people pray for their constituency, devotion to craft can demonstrate
that reverence, love, and dedication are sacred, meaningful, and transcendent.
Why? Because craft is about walking the walk and not just
talking the talk. Which is why we may shiver when we hear an artist didn't
fabricate their own work. And why I always fabricate mine.
Not all labor-intensive work is devotional. If the work is
done mainly out of perfectionism, ambition, or fear—even if it is immensely
time-consuming—it's still driven by ego or outcome. The focus is on control,
mastery, or proving worth. This was foremost on my mind with the dome, because
I know I can lean into all those things without noticing if I'm not careful. That's
not inherently bad, but it's not devotional in spirit. However, when time and
effort are offered in a spirit of care and reverence, the labor itself becomes
an act of devotion. I don't see this type of intensity as a form of
self-punishment or a display of ego, but as a gesture of faith in the value of
attention. Every hour, every minute spent is a way of saying that
care—CARE—still matters. That something made slowly, by hand, and with love
(the complicated kind of love that encompasses and devours hate) can be sacred
simply because someone went to the trouble.
As it becomes ever clearer that carelessness will lead to
the death of our planet and perhaps our species, demonstrations of
care-despite-the-inconvenience are more important than ever. This is
unconditional love.
Obviously, I believe that art without devotional sacrifice
is lacking. Meaning, I actually believe in a form of human sacrifice. A chunk
of the artist—me, in the case of the dome—should stay with the work forever. I
don't get to keep that part of myself. Without that, it will never have any
autonomous lifeforce and will not be inspiring to others. That is what
inspiration is—in-spirit-ing—the passing of the breath of life from one to
another. And this hearkens to the true erotic definition of creativity. It
ALWAYS means to create life. To those iconoclasts who find this competes with
God, well, they may be correct.
PART VI. BRAINS AND HANDS, not
BRAINS VS HANDS
I am deeply invested in dissolving mind/body splits and am
fond of reminding people that a good portion of the brain is devoted to hands
and eyes. Clearly that makes craft the ultimate conceptual art, just sayin'.
As mentioned before, denying sensual pleasure as a carrier
of meaning is not only false, but also desperately depressing and pointless. Ultimately,
thinking of our brain as a squishy thing in a skull, separate from the
environment, is also false. We are not angels in a meat sock. To paraphrase
Anjan Chatterjee, we arise from nature and exist wholly consolidated with it.
Our brain doesn't end outside the cranium; it extends out our limbs, through
our hands and feet, and expands to fill the universe.
To divide the creative process into thinking and then doing
is to doom creativity to manufacturing. Another reason why we may secretly feel
uncomfortable when we hear an artist didn't have a "hand" in their
own work.
As I said before, my intention was to go about making the
dome in the most difficult and agonizing way possible. I hope I have shown you
why I think there's value in that, and therefore in all craft. Craft is my love
language. It is not just work; it is devotion made visible. Every careful
action, every painstaking touch, every hour spent serving what might seem
trivial is a rebellion against a world that forgets to care.
It is beauty's labor, pleasure's insistence, and a refusal
to let life elapse unnoticed and uncared for. To make by hand is to declare
that love matters, that attention matters, that we—fragile, mortal, puny
humans—matter.
And that, more than anything, is why we need to keep
making.
©Judith Schaechter, 2026
