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 And I was reminded that the age-old adage, “seeing is believing” is obsolete.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
