The artisanal urge-the fundamental human desire to make something with one's own hands-has never been so endangered as it is right now. Quite frankly, this is a situation that sends a chill down my spine. Consider the work of Jeff Koons, one of the most widely discussed and highly praised artists of the last 20 years. His Hanging Heart, [figure 1] an oversized version of a shiny magenta bauble suspended from a golden ribbon, obviously manufactured to the artist's specs, recently sold at auction for $23.6 million. So far as I am concerned, Hanging Heart is a piece of generic mall trash, only on steroids. This is an assembly line thingamajig, customized for some hedge-fund manager who doesn't know what to do with all his disposable income. And Koons is not alone. Damien Hirst, Mike Kelley and Takashi Murakami are among the other art stars whose exhibitions are packed with works that have been designed by the artist whose name is on the marquee, but have by and large not been executed by the artist himself. The Murakami show last fall at Los Angeles's Museum of Contemporary Art, with its ready-for-the-web cartoon characters and poster-bright flowers, was a case in point. The exhibition [now at Brooklyn Museum of Art through July 13]included a boutique full of Murakami's Louis Vuitton handbags [figure 2], just in case anybody had missed the point that product-development has trumped the magic of making things. "Look, no hands" might be the newest slogan in the museums and galleries where contemporary art is exhibited.

These days, when I go around the galleries, I often feel as if I'm living in a topsy-turvy art world. What I regard as essential values have become marginalized values; the artisanal urge, which I believe is as basic to a painter as it is to a weaver, as basic to a sculptor as it is to a potter, has become a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. Some will argue that this is not an entirely new story. It is true that a generation ago, Andy Warhol was amused to have his silk-screen paintings executed by assistants. And of course it has been nearly a century since Marcel Duchamp put a signature on a urinal purchased from a plumbing supply outfit and attempted to exhibit it as a work of art. Still, there has never before been a time when the handmade was as thoroughly marginalized as it is right now, at least from the vantage point of the movers and shakers in the auction houses and the blue chip galleries. There are still many new works in which we are held by the artist's immersion in the powers and possibilities of the hand. The radiantly casual paintings that Bill Jensen [figure 3] exhibited last year at Cheim and Read in New York City, with their layered calligraphies, come to mind. But in today's art world, the artisanal urge is at best a personal choice, no longer the essence of art but something more like a possibility among possibilities. I find this dismaying.

Until recently, even many of us who were skeptical about the value of Andy Warhol's silk-screened Brillo boxes and Duchamp's readymades were willing to go along with the definition of a work of art that was born with the Dadaists and enshrined by the Pop artists, namely that art is whatever somebody chooses to put in an art gallery. What was the point of arguing whether Duchamp's factory-produced snow shovel and bicycle wheel were or were not works of art, when we were still free to assert that they were failed works of art? That argument, however, does not sound as comforting as it used to, now that the image of the artist as a theoretician or a trickster has come close to eclipsing an older idea of the artist as a magician. Recently, I have been feeling a strong urge to revisit first principles, to ask, frankly and forthrightly, what it is that draws us to art in the first place. And the answer to this question, so I believe, is that we crave the handmade-ness of things, that we want (we need!) to see that an expressive something can be made out of the inchoate substance that is a lump of clay or a dab of oil paint.

The more I am convinced that aesthetic experience is essentially an experience of handmade-ness, the more I am convinced that the activities that we conventionally divide into the arts and the crafts are in some sense inseparable. I realize that this is a rather old-fashioned view, this view that a painter and a potter are members of the same brotherhood or sisterhood, something out of the oak-paneled-and-stained-glass world of William Morris. A decade ago, I myself might have dismissed this idea of the unity of the arts as not so much untrue as beside the point. But by now the conviction that any factory-produced object can be pronounced a work of art (and a great work of art at that) has become disturbingly ubiquitous. And I am inclined to join forces with the Arts and Crafts fundamentalists and insist that there is no such thing as a work of art that is not, first and foremost, a work made by hand. A critical turning point in my own thinking on these matters was the great show "Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics," which I saw at Japan Society in New York in 2003. In the work that Noguchi produced in Japan in the 1950s, the distinction between a sculpture and a bowl or a plate did not so much dissolve as it gave way to primary assertions, about the character of forms and surfaces, concerns that united the making of radically different types of objects, objects utilitarian and otherwise. What Noguchi suggested was that there are deep, genetic links between the art traditions and the crafts traditions, a shared conviction that the magic is in the making, that in some essential sense the making trumps the conceptualizing, that art must be made before it can be imagined, that the hand leads the eye and the mind.

For decades, indeed for more than a century, craftspeople have been arguing that their work should be taken as seriously as the work of painters and sculptors. But what concerns me here is not the question of reception so much as the more fundamental question of conception. What interests me is not only the work of the singular, much-discussed figure within the crafts tradition, a Betty Woodman or a Sheila Hicks [figure 4] whose work is regularly seen in the museums, but also the crafts traditions in their most elemental form. I am interested in the artisanal urge as a basic urge, the urge that a child might first discover when making a pot out of a coil of clay, and which I now believe is not entirely different from the urge that propels the mature painter into the studio each morning. Recently, I've found myself regarding with renewed interest the more or less humble products of the craftsperson's labors, the ceramic bowls or wooden utensils or woven mats that you see at fairs all over the country. I am interested in the relative success or failure of such objects, their elegance or clunkiness, their originality or conventionality. I find that the aesthetic judgments that we make about the quality of a glaze on a pottery serving dish are not necessarily all that different from the judgments that confront the painter or sculptor in the studio. All works of the visual imagination-a midcentury ceramic bowl, a painting by Picasso, a sculpture by Bernini, a Peruvian weaving-originate in the same, singular impulse, this artisanal urge. True, there are functional objects and there are nonfunctional objects, and this is a complex matter, when we consider that even a painting has a function. But the essential point is that if the artisanal urge is not felt, somehow, in its fundamental form, then the work, whether painting or pot, is of no interest, at least not to me.

The enormous appeal of the work of Koons and Murakami and Hirst has everything to do with its mass-produced look. That industrial chill is reassuring to an art audience that knows the chain stores and the suburban malls far better than the galleries and the museums. The artisanal image can provoke anxiety, because its uniqueness demands a unique response. When Hirst [figure 5] exhibits a medicine cabinet complete with bottles and pills designed to resemble the ones that you buy in the drugstore, whatever message he is offering about our medicated society is greased by a jokey familiarity. When Koons exhibits a stainless steel replica of one of the animals made of balloons to delight young kids, he's offering a work of art that is as generic as a set of dishes from Crate & Barrel. Like Koons's stainless steel animal, each Crate & Barrel dinner plate is factory perfect. And such a dinner plate can be a lot more reassuring than the plates made by a potter on a wheel, each with its variations that force us to react, to judge. The need to judge can provoke anxiety. Thus the attraction of the Hirst medicine cabinet or the Koons animal, which might be said to be prejudged. The industrial look becomes a seal of approval.

At this point, I find that I am backing my way into what amounts to an old conflict between the view of art as essentially a matter of ideas and the view of art as essentially hands-on expression. Since the beginning of the 20th century, many people have interpreted the celebration of factory-produced forms as quintessentially modern in its rejection of an antiquated artisanal world. One might go further and argue that the factory-produced aura of so much recent art suggests a final, triumphant re­futation of Plato's belief that the sculptor or painter is essentially a manual worker, and therefore a secondary citizen. Nobody could accuse Koons or Hirst of being a manual worker. Duchamp sometimes liked to gently mock artists who took pleasure in the making of things, saying that many people "paint because they love the smell of turpentine," but that he had never had the "olfactory sensation of most artists." I think he was complaining about more than the smell of paint; he was rejecting the magic of the studio. Duchamp replaced the romance of the studio with another romance, the romance of the anti-artisanal object. And the artists who have followed in Duchamp's wake, and there are more of them pouring out of M.F.A. programs each year, believe that they are entering a brave new world, a world of impersonal industrial production that offers them a paradoxical kind of artistic freedom. Some critics have seen in the iciness of these factory-produced works of art echoes of older classical or neoclassical ideas, a philosophic chill that mingles with the tongue-in-cheek mood of Koons's work.

Classical values, so far as I am concerned, are very much artisanal values. There has always been a place for cool and polish and impersonality in the visual arts. Indeed, an essential aspect of the artisanal urge is the push toward perfection. The thrill of certain great paintings, Ingres's portraits [figure 6], for example, is in the alchemy by which the porcelain- smooth surfaces confound our expectations as to what the artist's hand can achieve. And many of the grandest sculptures are cast in bronze in workshops where the designer may in fact take a marginal role or no role at all. But there is an essential difference between the work that was once done in a bronze foundry and much of what we are seeing in the museums and galleries now. In earlier times, the studio-produced or machine-tooled look was itself an extension of the handmade look, yet another embodiment of an artisanal tradition. For the generation of Koons, Hirst, and Murakami, the anti-mystique of the assembly line has trumped the former power of the handmade image; they are apostles of the anti- artisanal aesthetic.

Potters and weavers are likely to smile when they hear contemporary painters and sculptors complaining about their increasing marginalization, because craftspeople have for generations watched as their own work was marginalized by factory-produced goods. By now the marginalization of the crafts traditions can look like a rehearsal for what in recent years has come to be referred to as the death of painting, which many critics use as a shorthand for the death of nothing less than the handmade work of art. So it is not surprising that some of those earlier struggles to preserve the crafts traditions can take on fresh significance now. For example, the arguments that the great English potter Bernard Leach made in A Potter's Book, first published in 1940, might suggest a rallying cry for today's painters, if only you substitute the word "painting" for "pot" and "painter" for "potter." "Beauty," Leach writes, "will emerge from a fusion of the individual character and culture of the potter with the nature of his materials." What Leach is emphasizing is the visceral nature of creation, the extent to which the final product can never be separated from the mysterious process of its making. "The shape of a pot," he insists, "cannot be dissociated from the way it has been made." And couldn't we say the same about the shapes in a painting? Or the colors? Or the metaphors?

What fascinates me, reading Leach's account of the making of a pot, is how intimately linked the final form is with the act of making. Indeed, this link is the essential subject of his book, which is basically a how-to manual. Leach relates formal values to the instinctive human urge to make something, to form something. And his matter-of-fact formalism has a lot to recommend it, at least when we consider the philosophic abstractness of ideas such as "significant form" and "purism," which has led some people to imagine that art can be created without using your hands. It was once common practice to compare the sleek form of Brancusi's Bird in Space [figure 7] with the shapes of a factory-produced propeller. Of course, there is a resemblance, but there is also a world of difference. And we cannot appreciate that world of difference unless we understand the artisanal urge. A drawing by Picasso and a hand-turned wood salad bowl, a painting by Bill Jensen and a weaving by Sheila Hicks-all of these exist in the same universe of discourse, and are more closely related to one another than any of them is to Jeff Koons's Hanging Heart. Creative spirits, whether painters or potters, cannot leave a mark on the world if they have not first left a mark on their materials.