Applied Arts Implied Art Craftsmanship A
Applied Arts Implied Art Craftsmanship A
Applied Arts Implied Art Craftsmanship A
VLAD IONESCU
art historiography, focusing on the work of
ing. Referring to the aesthetics of Paul Valéry and the design
Aloïs Riegl, Heinrich Wölfflin and Wilhelm
Worringer. Between 2009 and 2013, he
co-translated and co-edited the series Jean-
theory of Jacques Vienot, the author proposes a contempo-
rary interpretation of applied arts as implied art, a form of
Applied arts, implied art
François Lyotard. Writings on Contemporary
art between fine art and design that describes human life, its
Arts and Artists (Leuven University Press).
His research has been published in various
edited volumes and in the Journal of Art
experiences and the occasional poverty thereof. Arts appliqués, art impliqué
Historiography, ARS, Art History Supplement,
Deleuze Studies, Architectural Histories, A+ Quel est le sens de l’artisanat à l’ère de la productibilité nu-
and Cultural Politics.
mérique ? Arts appliqués, art impliqué est une réflexion cri-
tique sur la créativité artistique et son importance culturelle
A&S / books
2016
Distinctions
Applied arts, decorative arts and handicrafts, arts and
crafts, ornamental arts, cottage industry and industrial de-
sign are practices that have often been distinguished from
the ine arts. he Greek diferentiated between crafts (that
required technè or “know-how”) and scientiic knowledge
(or episteme); the main goal of the distinction was to dis-
cern between the contingent situations that determine the
ield of technique from the necessary truths of science.
However, the dualistic thinking in terms of “ine” and “ap-
plied arts” is a modern symptom: whatever is done without
a pre-established purpose represents pure beauty and what-
ever bears an external goal represents adjacent beauty. A
Kantian ixation with typologies even though it was Kant
- the father of modern aesthetics - who illustrated the free
beauty with ‘designs à la grecque, the foliage for borders or
on wallpapers.’1 However, no epoch before the Renaissance
has even identiied the craftsman as diferent from other art-
ists. To employ artefacts within broader social practices was
something that was regulated by the guilds: painters and
stonemasons worked within the broader cultural context
where their art gave form to a religious ritual that includ-
ed an entire community.2 Craftsmanship was just one layer
Domesticity
Emerging within the background of the industrial rev-
olution, the Arts and Crafts movement maintained a con-
sistent distrust towards the qualitative and aesthetic con-
sequences of technology. he criterion of reference was a
Romanticised medieval age where the unique crafted object
was the rule. Whereas the Gothic stonemasons created in-
imitable and long-lasting objects, the mechanical reproduc-
tion of a pattern generates cheap eigies. However, there
is an alternative to this disconsolate chapter of modern art
history that has been exhaustibly researched. Towards the
end of the 19th century, an art historian relected on the ap-
plied arts in quite a dispassionate fashion. For Aloïs Riegl,
technology was an integral part of what we call applied arts.
he Austrian art historian began his career as curator of the
textile collection at the Imperial and Royal Museum for Art
and Design (the current Museum für angewandte Kunste)
that opened its doors in 1864. Prior to his highly inluen-
tial history of ornament, Aloïs Riegl researched the impact
of modernity on traditional craftsmanship in continental
Europe.
Even though Riegl did not intend to resist the deper-
sonalising efects of the industrial revolution, he did reject
a powerful intellectual paradigm, namely the materialistic
explanation of art. Within such a paradigm, a tapestry is
understood to depend on the used material and technique,