Art Buff

Months ago I wrote about visual creativity and how I understood it as a concept broken into five often overlapping categories: Art, Craft, Design, Folk Art, and Illustration. 

In the past week, I’ve spent a lot more time focusing on this idea and feel like I’ve refined it a bit more. I now see each of the four categories other than art defining themselves against art through a particular constraint on creativity (that is, something that takes priority over absolute creativity). Their priorities break down as such:

Art: Personal freedom and creativity are paramount. Thus, style, approaches, and techniques tend to be highly individualistic.

Illustration: Complementing and representing text becomes paramount. Individual style and creativity are still very important but are limited by concern for the text.

Craft: A concern for function places limits on form and material. Function introduces a priority very different from creative freedom, and these separate ideas must complement each other.

Design/Architecture: A large number of creative visual activities where other priorities must be taken into account (functionality, advertising, structural requirements, etc.).

Folk Art: Tradition and a respect for shared culture and its style, history, etc. take precedent over total creativity. Creativity must exist within a cultural frame.

Obviously creating categories likes these will always be a messy and incomplete exercise, but these five really help me put things into perspective and wrap my head around everything that people create visually in today’s world.

Each category other than art is defined by its creative constraint, while art is defined as “Something that is created with the intention that it is art, produced through a process where creative freedom is of paramount importance.”