Art, Craft, and the Cruise Ship in the Room
Lately in my life, the question keeps come up. What is art? It comes up over coffee, in the studio, and most pointedly at the Saint John Art Club, which is having the conversation.
Here’s the honest backdrop. The club is watching its cashflow, revisiting its bylaws, and asking whether it can open the doors wider without turning into a flea market. Reasonable people want reasonable things. More members, more energy, more art. Nobody wants to become the church-basement version of a cruise terminal gift shop.
So. What counts.
The Urinal in the Room
Every time somebody tries to define art, a Frenchman named Duchamp shows up to ruin it. In 1917 he signed a urinal, called it “Fountain,” and submitted it to a serious exhibition. It’s in the textbooks now. If a plumbing fixture can be art, a lighthouse on a fridge magnet has itself a pretty good lawyer.
That’s the trouble with drawing the line by medium. Canvas, magnet, mug, tea towel. The surface was never the thing. Photography was “not art” once. So was jazz. So, for a long stretch, was almost anything women made at home, which we filed under craft and hung in the kitchen instead of the gallery.
Craft Is Not a Slur
But let’s be careful here. Calling something “a craft” has a long history of quietly meaning “made by the wrong kind of person.” Quilts, pottery, hooked rugs. Extraordinary work, kept out of the front room because it was useful, or cheap, or made by somebody’s grandmother. If the bylaws start sorting art from craft, they should know exactly whose hands they might be sorting out.
A Machine Can Hold the Brush
Then there’s AI, which everyone expects me to be scandalized by. I work with a local soap maker turned artist. She’s building paint-by-number kits of local animals. Does she use AI? Some. Is AI a tool? Yes, the way a camera is a tool, the way a projector is a tool that plenty of “real” painters use and never mention. Can she actually paint? Absolutely. And not only do tourists love them but so do locals.
The Flea Market Fear
This is the nerve it hits, though. One club member paints lighthouses on magnets and sells them on the street when the cruise ships come in, and once, memorably, inside the club when it rained. Some club members don’t think that’s art, including myself and I want to be fair about why. It isn’t the lighthouse. It isn’t even the selling. Artists have always sold. Emily Carr made pottery and rugs to keep the lights on.
It’s the mass of it. Making a thing purely to move a hundred identical copies to strangers who won’t remember the town by tomorrow. Something in me goes a little seasick at that. The point was never the object. The point was the transaction.
Where I Draw the Line, in Pencil
So here’s my working definition, offered in pencil so it can be erased. Art is what happens when someone makes a singular thing to say something, and takes the risk that you won’t care. Craft, in the honourable sense, is mastery of the making. Product is the thing designed first to sell and only second, if ever, to mean.
Most real practice is a messy blend of all three, and that’s fine. The magnet painter might make one strange, honest painting on a Tuesday that stops me cold. The soap maker might turn a paint-by-number into something nobody saw coming (and she already has). The door should stay open to exactly that.
What the Club Actually Has to Decide
My unsolicited advice, since I’m already in this deep: don’t write bylaws that police mediums or prices. You’ll spend years arguing about magnets. Write bylaws about intent and originality, and about what the club is for. Be the place that makes room for the singular and the strange, and let the gift shop be a gift shop somewhere else.
Because if we can’t agree on what art is, we can at least agree on what we’re here to protect. That’s worth more than any bylaw.