Thinking and Making: Art and Craft in Library of Congress Classification

Introduction Why are art and craft so widely separated in the Library of Congress Classification System? All classification schemes give insight into the worldviews of the time in which they were created, and library systems are especially illustrative of the cultures and cultural moments which shaped them. It is not difficult to locate examples of bias for example--based on race, ethnicity, gender- and nationality--in both Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) and the Library of Congress system (LC), which dominate the field of classification in American public and academic libraries; many books and articles going back to the early 1970s have pointed out these concerns (Berman, Foskett, Webster). The library profession seems to have had fewer conversations about bias as it affects different subject disciplines, however, and the separation between the subjects of art and craft proves an apt site for such a discussion, which has been a persistent and contentious one in the art world through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century (Auther, Bernstein). The separation of art and craft in LC, in N and TT respectively, compared to their co-location in DDC and other American library classification systems, suggests divergent approaches to the arts within librarianship, allowing insight to American views on the relative definitions of art and craft from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Context What exactly is the difference between art and craft? Immanuel Kant, in his 1790 Critique of the Power of Judgment, plotted a boundary between the two that remains influential, asserting that "art is ... distinguished from handicraft: the first is called liberal, the second can also be called remunerative art. The first [art] is regarded as if it could turn out purposively (be successful) only as play, i.e., an occupation that is agreeable in itself; the second [craft] is regarded as labor, i.e., an occupation that is disagreeable (burdensome) in itself and is attractive only because of its effect (e.g., the remuneration), and hence as something that can be compulsorily imposed" (Kant 183). Elissa Auther offers a modern framing of Kant's idea, suggesting that "fine art ... is characterized by a self-sufficiency or 'purposiveness without a purpose, [whereas] craft by contrast is characterized by a connection to an interest or purpose" (Auther xv). Echoes of Kant can be heard in contemporary discussions of the differences between art and craft. As the director of the Museum of Glass in Tacoma explained in 2003, "Our artists are working with ideas. Glass is just a medium for their expression (Bernstein 114). The charge that "craft works within the sphere of the familiar whereas art strives for creativity" and "radical 'differentness'" leads to a value judgment, that art is therefore superior to craft (Fethe 131). In western culture the borders of art and craft have fluctuated over time, and with every fluctuation there has been disagreement. In his 1993 article "Decorative Arts: A Problem in Classification," Steven Blake Shubert neatly outlines the history of this divide. Starting in ancient Greece and moving through the Middle Ages, Shubert shows that the distinction currently drawn between art and craft did not exist until quite recently: "what are now considered the visual arts (painting, drawing, sculpture etc.) were then considered crafts on the same level with weaving, ceramics, and woodworking. Likewise, in the medieval European universities the liberal arts (grammar, rhetoric, logic, geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy) did not include any of the visual arts (Shubert 77). According to Charles Fethe, "there has been a number of historical periods, such as in the Middle Ages, in which painters and sculptors saw themselves as basically craftsmen, creating attractive objects used in the conduct of daily life" (Fethe 134). W.J.T. Mitchell echoes Shubert's point: "the elevation of painting to the status of fine art is generally traced to the Renaissance, when it began to compete successfully with poetry in the pecking order of artistic disciplines" (Mitchell 1024). …