<div>On 5/26/06, Carrol Cox <<a href="mailto:cbcox@ilstu.edu">cbcox@ilstu.edu</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Yes. But before someone can be put in the category of "_good_ artist" there has to be the category of "artist" (as distinct from mere (!) "maker/creator." In Pope's _Essay on Criticism_ "art" is still pretty much a simile for "craftsmanship" or "conscious skill" (techne). I don't believe, in fact, that this conversation/debate could have been held in 1710, when "work of art" would (if intelligible at all) have been more or less a synonym for "artifact," "artifice" (as opposed to "work of nature"). Carrol </blockquote></div> Agreed generally.  These are all complications. I was using our "terms" very loosely to describe an historical process, and you correctly called me on it I think that Miles' point tends to get us away from a mere definition of terms and  makes us ask what makes an artifact important to specific people and social classes in specific societies.  (This is not, by the way, to argue that those artifacts can't be recognized out of context of social situation as "beautiful."  Excuse the scare quotes - both mine and yours - but I think that I should have put scare quotes around the word "good" in my previous comment.) There is every indication that Greek society (I only speak of the Greeks because I know much more about them than the societies based around the Tigris-Euphrates, the Nile, or the Indus Valley) distinguished good craftsmanship from bad long before we have historical records.  It seems unreasonable to me, no matter what the social position of individual craft-makers, who we know little about, that these craft-makers weren't also valued and thought of as good or bad.  I think it is reasonable to assume at first that only good art was recognized as valuable "apart from" social context or utilitarian use.  This is a tautology of recognition that can only be resolved by studying specific social situations.  (When does a well-made vase become an object valued because it is considered aesthetically "beautiful" for display as opposed to simply an object that can store wine? When is this value attributed to individual workers? etc.) What I think you point to in your contrast of Pope with us, brings up the question of the modern ideology of the individual artist, and exaltation of individual works. This is also a question about the social situation that the craft maker worked in and the "distance" of the "work" from its social context. (How separated is it from other contexts of society, religious, utilitarian, etc? What is its relation to commodification, etc. To move the time-line to 5th century BCE Greece, it is hard for me to believe that Sophocles was not recognized as an individual artist or a creator of works of art (close to our modern sense of those terms) in his own time.  The labels were different and as evidenced by both Plato and Aristotle the terms of the debate were different, but it is still a recognizable debate.  Jerry -- Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture <a href="http://monacojerry.livejournal.com/">http://monacojerry.livejournal.com/ </a> His fiction, poetry, weblog is Hopeful Monsters: Fiction, Poetry, Memories <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerrymonaco/">http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerrymonaco/</a> Notes, Quotes, Images - From some of my reading and browsing <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/community/jerry_quotes/">http://www.livejournal.com/community/jerry_quotes/</a>