Arts and Crafts forced Britain to copyright decoration
Decorative arts design and make objects meant to be both beautiful and useful—furniture, interiors, crafts—usually apart from architecture. They overlap applied arts and modern design, and Western thought long ranked them below painting and sculpture. That hierarchy is a post-Renaissance European habit, weak for Chinese art or early medieval Europe.
Vasari-era Italian theory prized High Renaissance fine-art values and left ornament looking secondary. China’s literati ink landscapes and workshop crafts long coexisted without the same snobbery, and in early medieval Europe the most prestigious objects were often precious metalwork rather than paintings. Amy Goldin, Anne Swartz, and later postmodern critique from the 1970s onward attacked the “lesser art” story.
Survival skews the picture too. Gold and silver pieces were routinely melted down and reused, textiles rot, and so museum cases today give an uneven sample of what past societies actually valued. A Limoges reliquary casket of about 1200, gilt copper with champlevé enamel over a wooden core, comes from workshops whose output, known as opus lemovicense, had won an international name by the late twelfth century. Antonio Maragliano’s carved wooden Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, made by his Genoese workshop around 1710–20, now sits in a decorative arts collection, not a sculpture gallery.
England’s nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement, drawing on Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and William Morris, raised craft’s social status. British law followed: until the Copyright Act 1911, only fine art was shielded from unauthorised copying; decorative work gained fuller recognition afterward.
Mass production created a new twist. Sociologist Colin Campbell describes the craft consumer who personalises identical goods to assert identity, whether through decoupage, customised cars, South Asian truck art or IKEA hacking. Seeing a chair as mere utility misses how pattern, material, and touch carry culture; the fine-versus-decorative line looks less like nature and more like a Renaissance ranking.
Source: Decorative arts
