Its status as craft is not in any way diminished by the engraving. In this age of neomodernism, society has determined that truth is relative, the human soul is non existent, and the divine is absent from a world founded in chaos. At the best, we live in a world adrift in a universe ruled by an uncertainty principle that allows matter to both not exist and exist in veils of swirling space dust, at the same time. It is a world where industrial production has virtually eliminated the need for hand made craft. From the perspective of this world, we must wonder what odd creature it is that still works with clay and calls itself potter.
Art is of the hunter and of the industrialist.
In a world of conflict, art makes an attempt at resolution. The agricultural world is finite, with its seasons to plant, its seasons of harvest, and its seasons of growth and fallow. Pottery gave form and function to those times after the herds were gone, and before the industrialism of the nineteenth century. The spirit of the industrialist of nineteenth century America was closer to the spirit of the hunter than to an agricultural spirit. It was a spirit of a landless people, lost in a seemingly endless wilderness, the wilderness of Lewis and Clark, of Jedediah Smith and of Kit Carson.