How valid is the distinction between crafts and arts? A number of recent exhibitions, most notably "Roppongi Crossing" at Tokyo's Mori Art Museum and "Space for Your Future" at the Museum of Contemporary Arts, Tokyo, have confronted us with this question, one that is of great relevance to Japanese art.
Back in the late 19th century, when Japan first encountered Western styles of art, the nation's artistic and intellectual elite cheerfully embraced a division between the two categories of creativity. But nowadays the hierarchy that once placed artists comfortably above craftsmen is starting to look shaky, with curators constantly blurring the lines between the two classes, almost as if they were jubilantly overturning a cruel system of aesthetic apartheid.
Encouraged by this curatorial trend, the Crafts Gallery of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, is the latest to challenge the dichotomy with "The Power of Crafts — Outlook for the 21st Century," the second of a two-part exhibition of crafts commemorating the 30th anniversary of its foundation. While the first part chronicled the gallery's history, the current exhibition, which runs till Feb. 17, attempts to set an agenda for the future, positing a borderless world where creators move effortlessly between the old categories.