March 13, 2017
Terra Foundation Paris Center & Library
Recently, in parallel with an increasing interest in making as a form of knowledge, design and craft have emerged as objects of academic and curatorial research. By defining craft as “a way of doing things” that affects art and design objects in numerous ways, scholars have introduced new values into the conceptual framework of art history, which challenge some of its fundamental assumptions, such as the autonomy of the work of art, the notion of artistic achievement through purely visual effects, the opposition between amateurism and professional work, or the self-critical values of artistic discourses.
Occurring in conjunction with the exhibition L’Esprit du Bauhaus, which examines the relationship between crafted objects and the art works produced by the avant-garde, the Terra Foundation Paris Center & Library hosts this conversation between Olivier Gabet, director of the Musée des Arts décoratifs and co-curator of L’Esprit du Bauhaus, and Glenn Adamson, a senior scholar at the Yale Center for British Art and author of Thinking through Craft (2007) and The Invention of Craft (2013), to reflect on the porous borders between art, craft, and design and the museum’s role in making apparent these interdisciplinary junctions.
Videography by Romain Grésillon.