Jess Castellote At a pottery workshop in Abuja, or in any of those found across Nigeria, potters shape clay on the wheel using gestures learned over generations.
The technique lives on through gestures learned and repeated across generations.
The object that emerges may be beautiful, demanding, even remarkable.
Yet in the conventional hierarchy of the art world, it sits below a painting hanging nearby.
One is called craft.
The other, art.
Frequently, I hear that the difference is fundamental, but I think it isn’t.
This is more an inherited division than a natural one.
The idea that creative work can be split into “pure” aesthetic expression and “functional” making arrived in Nigeria through contact with the West.
Like in many other parts of the world, before that contact, there was no such boundary here.
And when you look closely at the history of making in this region, the line begins to look less like a meaningful distinction and more like a cultural importation.
Part of what makes this division so durable is a confusion between two things that are worth keeping separate: aesthetic value, which belongs to any object that rewards sensory and perceptual attention, and artistic value, which is specific to works made within the interpretive and institutional frameworks we call art.
A hand-thrown pot can carry full aesthetic value—in its form, texture, and the evidence of its making—without being diminished by the fact that it is also useful.
The hierarchy does not strip such objects of aesthetic seriousness; it misrepresents them by treating aesthetic value as lesser than artistic value, and then using that misrepresentation to enforce a ranking.
That distinction, however, has taken root.
It shapes university departments, museum collections, gallery pricing, and the quieter assumptions about whose work counts as serious.
Fine art and applied art are frequently separated into different tracks, with different levels of prestige.
What appears to be a neutral classification turns out to be an imported hierarchy.
The bronzes of Benin City were cast by hereditary guilds—the igbesanmwan—within a system that combined technical mastery, ritual knowledge, and historical record.
These works served royal courts, marked events, and carried layered meanings.
Were they art or craft? The question doesn’t really apply.
They were made within a framework that did not divide aesthetic value from function.
In Benin, as in much of the pre-modern world, that opposition simply did not exist.
And yet it would be wrong to conclude from this that these works lacked what we now call artistic value.
They carried it fully: they demanded interpretation, encoded meaning, and shaped the experience of those who encountered them.
What the later European hierarchy did was not invent a distinction that had been absent; it imposed a ranking onto a distinction that these traditions had simply never treated as a ranking.
The bronzes were not lesser because they served a court.
Their seriousness lay precisely in the full weight of purpose they carried.
The same holds in Yoruba traditions.
A Gelede mask, an Ifa tray, or a length of aso-oke—each is at once technical, symbolic, social, and aesthetic.
The Yoruba concept of àrà—often translated as “art,” though, I am told, it means more than that—does not sort objects into higher and lower categories.
A weaver was not doing something lesser than a sculptor, only something different.
This is not unique to Nigeria.
Chinese collectors prized ceramics as highly as painting.
In Islamic traditions, intellectual and aesthetic rigor found expression in architecture, textiles, and metalwork.
In Japan, the tea bowl or lacquer object could demand as much attention as any painting.
These examples are not exceptions.
They point to something simpler: the idea that functional objects cannot be art is historically narrow and culturally specific.
The distinction took shape in medieval Europe, where scholars separated the “liberal arts” from the “mechanical arts.” Over time, painting and sculpture were elevated, while activities tied to manual skill—pottery, weaving, metalwork—remained lower in status.
By the 18th and 19th centuries, this hierarchy had hardened into institutional practice within academies, universities, and museums.
There were challenges.
Critics like John Ruskin and William Morris argued that separating design from making diminished both.
They insisted that all forms of making deserved equal regard.
They were persuasive, but the system—the academies, universities, and museums—largely remained intact.
What they could not have foreseen was how far this framework would travel.
Through colonial education and cultural institutions, it spread across Africa and Asia, reshaping how societies understood their own traditions.
Three common arguments are used to justify the divide....
