Bruce metcalf writing styles
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Express Yourself. Or Not.
##By Bruce Metcalf
Express Yourself. Or Not.
You see a lot of bad art when you teach in an art school. Students arrive with all sorts of preconceptions, which they try to make into art. I never felt it was my job to disabuse undergrad students of their stupid ideas; I saved that task for grad school. My purpose was to help students figure out who they were, so they could eventually make decisions that reflected their passions and interests. In the meantime, I had to look at mountains of really awful art.
I remember one student in particular. She was a painting grad at Kent State, not my student at all. She was something of a legend: supremely confident, violently hostile to criticism, ridiculously naïve, and stunningly inept. She was easily the worst painting grad student I have ever seen. I had no idea how she got into grad school, but the painting faculty did things like that. They wanted to beef up their numbers, so their standards for acceptance w
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Crafts: Second Class Citizens?
© Bruce Metcalf
My first major article, “Crafts: Second Class Citizens?” was published in the first issue of Metalsmith magazine twenty-five years ago. It was a debut for both of us. The article was the start of my project to provoke a more lively discussion of ideas about what we do, as jewelers and metalsmiths. We’re both still at it: Metalsmith is still publishing, and I’m still writing. For the twenty-fifth anniversary of Metalsmith’s first issue, Suzanne Ramljak has invited me to look back on “Crafts: Second Class Citizens?” to see what’s changed and what has remained the same.
It can be embarrassing to reread one’s old writing. It’s like looking at your old student work. Some of it makes you cringe. In “Second Class Citizens,” I equated aesthetics and art criticism, which is hardly true. I centered my definition of craft on medium, process, and functi
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Craft, from our retrospective view, also meant the decorative arts. Generally, this begrepp denoted hand-made luxury goods for use and display inside buildings, and for use and display on the human body. The use of the word "arts" suggests a certain high-toned quality, setting up an motstånd between a couch, and, for instance, a grabb tool. The couch might wind up in an art museum, under the purview of a decorative arts department, but the tool remained anonymous and invisible, not worthy of preservation until the early part of this century.
Craft also meant trades and folkways. That is to say, there were long traditions of pre-industrial production of hand-made objects, from roof thatching and chair-bodging, to weaving homespun and carving treen. Some of these trades became professionalized, organized into guilds and unions, as with metalsmithing. Over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, some of these trades adapted to industrialization, as the trade of meta