The well spring of the fine arts, as compared to the craft arts, is currently at a perilously low ebb. The presumed redemption for crafts artists, consequently, will not be found in the muddied waters that presently pervade that world. A search for a new source to replenish this reservoir must be begun in earnest and the craft arts can point the way. Unfortunately, many in the craft arts rely on the flooded fine art world to locate their own conceptual bearings. A multitude has already succumbed.

The particular tendencies and mechanisms that characterize the modern fine art culture are well known. The principal hallmarks of the present system include: commoditization, elevation of the avant guard as the prime motive of the artist, the use of advertising media to generate artificial demand, the encouragement of limited production to facilitate high prices, bohemianism as the primary role model of the artist, the autonomous production of art, and the seclusion of the aesthetic experience to galleries and museums. Contemporary fine artists for the most part, have become docile cogs in an elaborate design, manufacturing and distribution system for galleries, museums and other art related institutions. The symbiotic character of this burgeoning economic omniculture is inescapable, it seems, for both producer, purveyor and consumer.

Art and artists have been isolated from the large public audience, principally for monetary reasons. Fine artists produce precious works for wealthy collectors and it is this fountainhead that craft artists have so assiduously envied and sought. However, it is precisely this orientation to artistic creation that the fine art world has lost its own aesthetic bearings. The contemporary economic strategies designed to increase value have simultaneously structured the character of artistic expression. Furthermore, post-modernist fine art culture accentuates intellectual, emotional and aesthetic distance from its potential audience. The gallery has been the primary instrument in moving art further and further from its source: the everyday life of the people who comprise the community of the artist.

One might contend, on the other hand, that throughout history countless art works had been commissioned by innumerable pharaohs, kings , popes and other important personages. Not only did these works serve the rich and the powerful but they also served the society at large. However, innovative art work of the past did not have as its primary aim the alienation of its audience. Indeed, much of contemporary artistic expression seems designed explicitly, and only, to provoke.

Not surprisingly, today's public neither understands nor respects the bulk of contemporary artistic endeavors. Thus, the inability of the larger potential audience to develop an empathetic response to contemporary art has had the pernicious affect of making art appear meaningless, irrelevant and unimportant.

It appears that for artists to reach exalted status they must necessarily produce work that most people could not possibly appreciate. Herein lies the rationale for the avant guard: Art that is ahead of its time is not produced for a contemporary, common, audience; rather art is for a tiny future cadre of cognoscenti. Is it possible today that artists must produce work for an audience that does not yet exist? If this is the case, then George Ohr must certainly have had Garth Clark in mind while producing his pots.

Historically, in most societies and cultures, artists were generally respected by their contemporaries. They produced work of consensual value. The current convention of artist as aesthetic extremist or revolutionary is anomalous. The most esthetically aggressive, hostile, vacuous, and offensive expressions today are produced for an extremely small, cloying minority. Common people are simply too perplexed or disinterested to fathom fine art. Worse, the publicity generated by this very peculiar orientation to art can inflict real harm. For example, one presidential candidate not too long ago threatened that if elected he would "padlock the doors of the NEA and fumigate it".

Obviously, fine artists who in their role strive to be controversial or revolutionary in their expressions are bound to turn a few heads. To their own detriment, it is on their own heads that they have brought down the house. More and more frequently, the fine art world has exiled itself into a theoretical/aesthetic corner by pursuing values that have little meaning to the common person.

Craft artists must disentangle themselves from the straight-jacket of the fine art aesthetic that rejects out of hand beauty, timelessness, tradition, relevancy, and function. Today, craft artists must reestablish the well-spring of an art whereby the concept originates from everyday life and common human experience and does not confuse value and quality with monetary riches. Unfortunately, it appears that craft artists are annexing most, if not all, of the noxious aspects of the fine art culture in their rush to a false legitimacy.

Peter Voulkos, the vaunted ceramic sculptor of the 1950's and 1960's, helped to break through traditional fine art media fossilizations. This particular artist's proponents, however, mistakenly trumpeted the notion that he expanded the crafts. On the contrary, Voulkos helped to open up the closed circle of the fine art world. The crafts world has yet to reach the downside terminus of this particular individuals revelation. Nonetheless, craft artists now routinely use craft media to create fine art sculpture.

Craft techniques for making objects have not been, historically, included in the repertoire of fine artists. Painting pigments on various surfaces, obviously, qualifies as an acceptable artistic methodology. Throwing pottery on the wheel does not yet posses this cachet. Indeed, the women of Rookwood art pottery at the turn of the century were cognizant of this exclusion. Lacking any other evidence of painterly expression in ancient cultures, art history professors developed the quaint custom of including a brief review of early pottery in their courses. However, one suspects that if numerous oil painted canvasses were discovered intact from ancient cultures then its pottery would scarcely be mentioned.

A few fine artists have indulged in the appearance of using craft arts from time to time. Like the women of Rookwood Pottery, Picasso painted on pots. Although not technically involved in craft, Picasso turned clay into art by applying his painters brush to the pot. Does it follow that pottery can be considered fine art only when a certifiable artist is involved? Thousands of examples of painted pottery by anonymous craft artists from around the world speak eloquently against this particular fine art fabrication.

For craft artists there is another logjam. Craft media have traditionally been associated with utilitarian forms. Therefore, what is the advantage of freeing craft media and technique for fine art expressions if the crafts themselves are still bedeviled by function? Obviously, if the fine art world's assertions of purity of expression are to be accepted, the onus of function must also be exorcised. Unfortunately, many craft artists have already accepted this proscription and are eager to fashion non-utilitarian fine art objects from traditional craft media. As recent exhibitions demonstrate, in today's craft world there are as many non-teapots as teapots.

The premise for denying utilitarian interests in art is counterfeit. Simply, one must acknowledge that art has always had utilitarian roots and that so-called fine art objects had never been entirely divorced from aspects of utility or direct function until modern times. Today, however, one can discuss the cathedral but not the chalice, the castle but not the armor, the temple but not the reliquary. History is rife with art objects whose utilitarian properties were never an obstacle to their aesthetic success. Architecture, the staple of art history courses, exposes the blatant hypocrisy entailed by denying functionality to art. Thus, by excluding concepts of function as they relate to art, western discourse on art has, again, been needlessly hamstrung.

Craft artists communicate values different from contemporary fine artists. Relevance, function, connection, warmth, continuity, and place are reaffirmed time and time again. It is the language of common human sense that the craft arts speak. Beautiful pottery makes ones life richer, fuller, deeper, and more human. Greek pottery, Shaker furniture, Palestinian embroidered dresses, Japanese kimonos, African masks, Inca jewelry: all glory in the process of construction and making, the richness of materiality, the sensuousness of tactility and the knowledge that shared values were conveyed directly to an audience in a most intimate, viable, and meaningful fashion. Craft objects possess a resonance and meaning that is immediate, direct, and unconfused.

The theoretical notions of crafts today exist within a principle that is heretical to the fine art world: that artistic expression can and should be accessible not only to the elite, but to everyone. Furthermore, crafts can demonstrate that artistic expression is not irrelevant, abusive or spurious. Crafts can confirm the way to this cardinal mainspring by reminding all of us of the importance of everyday reality. Until the fine arts culture recognizes that the power of art is not bound by economic exclusivity, aesthetic dissonance and abject greed but is concerned with human inter-relatedness, spirituality and transcendence in every facet of human existence, then the expressions of the craft arts will remain isolated in an oasis; there they should rightly abide.