Readings

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GENRE

Greenhalph uses two words to separate and describe a phenomenon of the Modernist practice; positivist and ironic.  Positivist is considered as effortless and safe in that those that are positivist, they push every angle far as possible but still following the parameters.  Irony has much to do with critique of how we as humans question our experience of the role and purpose of things.

To me, I probably fall under being ironic.  With my studio work, I relate flowers to the culture difference which I live between Korea and  the US.  But then I can also see myself as being a positivist.  I follow the parameters of certain projects but I still make what I want to make.  At times it can be a combination of both but I would definitiely have to say that I am mainly an ironic person.

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CRAFT

To this day, I have always considered ceramics as being part of fine arts.  And from that, it branches out to visual arts, which is also where ceramics falls under.  Playing with popiscle sticks and building a house, cutting papers to make snowflakes is what craft means to me.  Paul Greenhalgh writes “craft… was normally used in contexts that had nothing to do with creative artistic practice of any kind, but when it is used in the context of art, its multifarious nomencatic heritage has rendered it so ambivalent that many who are associated with it consider it a drawback”.

But what really draws the line between craft and fine arts has to do with economy.  It’s really interesting how every artist is able to make a living by selling their work but knowing how much to sell it for is something every artist should know.  Greenhalgh states that there are two ways of making money.  “The fine artist classically makes a living by selling a small number of handmade objects very expensively.  The designer makes a living by creating templates for objects that go into mass-production”.  “… craftsperson frequently is obliged to sell unique works at mass prices.”  All in all, wether you are a craftsperson or fine arts, we need to know which path to follow to know exactly how much our works are worth.  Like Greenhalgh says, “… to survive, it is necessary to either to make a lot of affordable things or a very few prestigious things”.