Thinking through Craft

Glenn Adamson

Softcover | 17.15 x 1.17 x 24.66 cm | 224 pp

Bloomsbury | 2018 | 9781350092631

This book is a timely and engaging introduction to the way that artists working in all media think about craft. Workmanship is key to today's visual arts, when high production values' are becoming increasingly commonplace. Yet craft's centrality to contemporary art has received little serious attention from critics and historians.

Dispensing with cliched arguments that craft is art, Adamson persuasively makes a case for defining craft in a more nuanced fashion. The interesting thing about craft, he argues, is that it is perceived to be 'inferior' to art. The book consists of an overview of various aspects of this second-class identity - supplementarity, sensuality, skill, the pastoral, and the amateur. It also provides historical case studies analysing craft's role in a variety of disciplines, including architecture, design, contemporary art, and the crafts themselves.

Co-published in Association with the Victoria and Albert Museum, London

"At a time when technical skill has been widely dismissed or outsourced in the production of art, Glenn Adamson crucially adds an entire spectrum of handcrafted objects to the creative history of the post-war era. And at a time when theoretical frameworks have stagnated, these objects, in his hands, bring with them a fresh and
sophisticated set of interpretive perspectives." THOMAS CROW, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

"Adamson asks provocative questions about the marginalisation of craft within the discourse of modernism. Best of all, he writes with a lucidity, energy and engagement that take the reader with him all the way." PENNINA BARNETT, Goldsmiths, University of London.

"A pathbreaking book" ELISSA AUTHER, University of Colorado.