The idea of craft is an unanticipated product of the Industrial Revolution. Since everything humans did before that time was craft in one way or another, involving hand and judgment, the concept of craft had nothing with which to contrast. But the Industrial Revolution robbed the hand of all its skills, building them instead into machines, leaving the hand to perform repetitive basic actions — turning a knob, tightening a nut, pressing a button. Everything that distinguished handed beings was appropriated by the machinery that turned out uniform products in quantities limited only by the capacity of society to consume them. The handed being could ideally have been eliminated were it not for that the whole process needed consumers, with the wherewithal to buy bicycle wheels, grooming combs, snow shovels, bottle racks, and urinals, all in profitable numbers. Craft emerged as a concept in the late 19th century as an anti-industrial ideology, which advocated returning skills to the hand, and aestheticizing the autographic quality of non-uniform products — the hand-made, the hand-wrought, the hand-sewn, the hand-spun, the hand-woven, the hand-molded. To choose the often rough and uneven craft object over the smooth and uniform industrial object was to declare one’s preference for a society radically different from the one industrialism generated. It was to will a more primitive and, allegedly, more fulfilling form of life. Craft folk were in, but not of, the industrialized society, as Christians were in, but not of, the Roman Empire.

My little list of industrial products is an emanation of some of the better known ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp, objects he selected for their absolute lack of handedness, and for being beyond good taste or bad. No one can differentiate one metal grooming comb from another by artistic criteria — they are all alike. So, no one can have good or bad taste in grooming combs. It is rarely emphasized that Duchamp’s most notorious work, Fountain, is a ceramic object, all the more ironic in that clay was a paradigm material for the celebration of handedness. Industrial production minimized difference and maximized efficiency: who needs a hand crafted urinal? (Duchamp famously said that plumbing was America’s greatest contribution to human happiness.) Much of what we are surrounded by is ready-made, like nails and screws. Duchamp’s brilliance lay in putting the question of why not ready-made art — art that could be picked up at the supermarket, costing no more than an accessory for dog owners?

With this, Duchamp opened an immense gap between art and craft, for he demonstrated that painting and sculpture, through their handedness, were examples of craft, exactly like ceramics or metalwork. The real contrast puts handedness on one side and intellect on the other. He spoke with contempt of “olfactory artists” in love with the smell of paint. Little matter if they were in love with the smell of sawdust or wet clay. for him, the work of art was an embodied idea. Many artists have displayed a contradiction Duchamp escaped, deploring industrial production in favor of handedness, but enjoying its benefits in bathroom, garage, and workshop.

The Industrial Revolution, transferring skill and strength to the machine, reduced the human body to a mechanical adjunct. The Information Revolution, transferring computational and inferential power to the computer, reduces the human mind to a computational adjunct, stoking its memory with data. Under industrialization, differences between bodies are irrelevant, as differences in minds are irrelevant in data processing. But the latter presupposes very different kinds of workers — a proletariat of literacy. Working conditions, by contrast with those in factories, are almost paradisal — clean, silent, and warm. It is easy to see how Americans, queried on the subject would choose a job in a cubicle, working with the latest technology, to any other employment. The way the computer is turned to after hours — playing video games, surfing the net, chatting with strangers — is evidence that the machine is not regarded as oppressive. Information workers remember how their parents’ lives were brutalized by factory work, using their scant free time to drink and brawl. The proletariat of literacy has ample leisure to cultivate the inner self through aerobics, meditation, rock concerts, recreational sex, and travel.

Duchamp was a prophet in showing the possibility of handless art. The practice of art became a conceptual exercise, leaving the hands clean. Think of how Duchamp dressed as a dandy, by contrast with the Abstract Expressionists, their work boots and overalls crusted with talismanic paint as if they were aborigines! There cannot be conceptual craft, if craft has handedness as part of its essence. But perhaps handedness is not as important as the critics of industrialism presuppose in seeking through the handicrafts a return to preindustrial ways of life. Perhaps the distances between art and craft will soften as the crafts become more conceptual. Indeed, that has already begun to happen, as artists recognize the poetry of use, and draw referential inspiration from the forms of historical cultures. Handedness, after all, was also corollary to Modernism, understood as fidelity to the material conditions of the media. Handedness and handlessness alike are corollary to Postmodernism, understood as meaning that everything is open to artists. The postmodern era of ceramics, under which handedness is merely one concept of many available to the ceramist, has only just begun.