After decades of deliberation it has become obvious what the crafts are. In late modern culture, the crafts are a consor-tium of genres in the visual arts, genres that make sense collectively for artistic,economic, and institutional reasons. There are no hard and fast rules about the genres implied by the word "craft." Things change.The genres covered here include ceramics, glass, textiles, furniture, woodworking,jewelry, and metalwork.

In this collection of essays, artists, histori-ans, and philosophers from around the world discuss some of the most important issues surrounding the crafts at this time,and in so doing, they suggest where these practices are headed. The issues include:Post-modernisn; tradition; individualism;new technology; ethnicity; domesticity;gender; cosmopolitanism; populism; the avant-garde; the role of museums, and the literature of craft.

CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Craft in a Changing World

     Paul Greenhalgh

CHAPTER 2 The Genre

     Paul Greenhalgh

CHAPTER 3 Studio Craft and Craftical Formation

     Kaneko Kenji

CHAPTER 4 Art Manufacturers of the 21st Century

     Karen Livingstone

CHAPTER 5 Re-inventing the Wheel -

     The Origins of Studio Pottery

     Julian Stair

CHAPTER 6 Creating Lasting Values

     Gareth Williams

CHAPTER 7 Glassmaking and the Evolution of the

     CraftProcess

     Keith Cummings

CHAPTER 8 Major Themes in Contemporary

     Ceramic Art

     Ronald Kuchta

CHAPTER 9 Site-SpecificMetalwork:

     An Architectural Dialogue

     Albert Paley

CHAPTER 10 Studio Jewdlery: Mapping the Absent Boc

     Linda Sandino

CHAPTER 11 Poor Materials lmaginativdy Applied:

     New Approaches to Furniture

     Joellen Secondo

CHAPTER 12 The Transformation of Textile Art:

     A Japanese Case Study

     Yoko Imai

CHAPTER 13 Neo-Tradition: A Nordic Case Study

     Widar Halen

CHAPTER 14 Plurality and Necessity:

     An Antipodean Case Study

     Janet Mansfield

CHAPTER 15 Shared Territory and Contested Spaces:

     An Anthropological Perspective

     Carole E. Mayer

CHAPTER 16 Intellectual Colonialism:

     Post-war Avant-garde Jewdlery

     Simon Fraser

CHAPTER 17 Altogether Elsewhere:

     The Figuring of Ethnicity

     Edmund de Waal

CHAPTER 18 Complexity

     Paul Greenhalgh

Bibliography

Index