There is no living ceramist who was taught to think that factories could produce art except, of course, Warhol's Factory. However, even that phenomenon received proper critical respect only recently, and grudgingly. For two generations, academies taught their art students to loathe Warhol (even as they furtively coveted his succès de scandale). In reaction to these disciplinary blinders, contemporary ceramic artists are reorienting production away from the studio to the factory. They are coming out of a conceptual closet to regain the tool kit and palette their predecessors forswore a hundred years ago for the sake of John Ruskin and William Morris's ideology of "handicraft." Ceramists need to recover the manufacturing methods of the 19th century and simultaneously learn 21st-century digital tools or other makers will encroach more deeply into their field. With this reorientation should come the realization that craft need not be an act of resisting technology-in previous centuries craft produced objects that engaged with society's chaos and complexity.

One contemporary Wedgwood ceramic exemplifies the relevance of factory production. Modeler Barry Dixon sculpted a truffle that Wedgwood then cast using a body Josiah Wedgwood called "black basalt." 1 The ceramic is deluxe and disturbingly scatological. Reminiscent of the vein worked by Ken Price, the truffle is more unnerving because it lacks self-consciousness and artiness. It comes at the mind like a marvel out of a Renaissance Wunderkammer. Finding a brand name on the scaly matte surface is a radical discovery, so different from recognizing a modern artist's work by a definitive look. The truffle proves that genuine skill still resides in Wedgwood's old Barlaston factory-that those hands are still relevant as art, design and craft. Try to categorize the provocative artifact and it rattles these canons, especially that of craft.

How should artists (and schools) reconsider the legacy of the factory? First, realize that the jigger and jolly, the sledging of plaster and the lathe require truly artistic skill sets, even if they come down to us through "divided labor." We must recognize that a greater proportion of the history of Western craft lies in manufactories than in rural traditions or back-to-the-land experiments. Second, stop speaking of "mass-production" without real understanding. There are factories and then there are factories. Staffordshire's producers fought to be categorized as manufactories during battles over labor laws and industrialization. Their argument was that manual skill prevailed in the industry, despite mechanization. Judy Attfield, the author of Wild Things, a feminist study that reclaims domestic work as part of design history, is one of the few voices to advocate that skilled factory labor be appreciated as craft.

Can makers of ceramics (or its historians) let go of Ruskin and Morris and stop seeing the factory in terms of timeworn sanctimonious sermons? Craft history can no longer afford to hold onto the stereotype of industry as "alienation." In addition to reconsidering the factory, craft advocates would do well to drop three other abstractions bedeviling "handicraft": the idealization of the autonomous craftsperson, the valo-rization of the autonomous object and the criterion of "pleasure in work" as a measure of art. These constructs remain pivotal inhibitions that need to be systematically eroded before craft education can be liberated from alternating between self-righteousness and victimization.

The "craftsman-artist" was a strategy to combat the division of labor but it contains an important contradiction: When the Arts and Crafts movement distinguished the craftsman as autonomous, it simultaneously signaled a withdrawal of engagement from the collective social economy. The cliché of "freedom" has become ingrained in craft lore. The craftsman-artist continues to be described as an inspired individual, as if the process were redemptive for society as a whole. The idealization of the individual atelier as a bulwark against "alienated labor" has remained widespread even now, as new disciplines, such as digital craft, challenge the primacy of traditional processes. Are the craftspeople engaging in DIY in the privacy of their home really being radical, or are they simply participating in niche consumption, merely like microbreweries promoting "ethical consumption?" I would argue that craft will revive its radical aspect only if it returns to engaging in collaborative production and addressing its audience by speaking in the vernacular.

Ruskin and Morris invoked the guild to suggest that craft was a social endeavor with deeper historical roots than the factory, and 50 years later Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus also considered it a sociopolitical solution. These guilds were utopian revivals intended to be free of alienation and poorly made goods. But did these men actually build guilds, or was the term merely a rhetorical device? The very name Morris & Company reveals how essential the chief designer was, and the firm's stasis after his death suggests that it was no closer to being a guild than was Liberty & Company. As for Gropius, the Bauhaus became an academic brotherhood with little respect for women and tradesmen. These so-called guilds masquerading as class-free organizations carefully maintained class divisions. The difference between the "mechanic" and the "craftsperson" was not determined in relation to skill, but to aesthetics and social status. Craftsmen were members of a genteel social class. Sociologists might describe this bifurcation of two faiths in craft-that of the romantic individual and the utopian guild-as a form of segregated consciousness. Morris and Gropius dreamed in terms of an elitist utopia. They cut craft off from its social discourse and context.

Today, the idealization of the autonomous craftsman lives on primarily in art schools, no small irony. A continued insularity from industry perpetuates Ruskin's generalization about the factory breaking "men into small fragments and crumbs of life," and, I argue, inhibits our recognition of craft as a broader phenomenon outside the sphere of Ruskin's genteel tradition. Liberal academics like to tear up as they recite the folk tale that industrialization de-skilled all artisans-showing their students Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) as an accurate critique of factory work. Reread Edward Lucie Smith's The Story of Craft (1983) and you may notice that his chapter titled "The Decline of Craft" describes the rise of the meatpacking system but fails to describe any other symptoms to warrant such an ominous and dramatic chapter heading. To be fair to William Morris and his band, they were railing against sweated labor, not Wedgwood, but today's cordon sanitaire preserving craft is usually based in fear, not concern for the welfare of others.

The rift ossified in the 1930s. When William Staite Murray dismissed Wedgwood's production, specifically Keith Murray's sleek futuristic pots, as "drawing-board stuff" lacking pathos, he maligned craft. Wedgwood employed talented throwers and turners to eliminate fingerprints from the ceramics. Murray's allusions to speed drew on Flash Gordon as an artistic dialect but were handmade. In contrast, the "studio" potter Staite Murray emphasized the expressionistic brushstroke and the wabi of stoneware, affectations of a different order. We must concede that the anonymous skill of the Wedgwood operative was genuine craft, honed by three centuries of workmanship. And the real story of craft is found in such collaborations. Wedgwood integrated Keith Murray's streamlined design, Norman Wilson's luminous matte glazes, and their workers' nimble hands. No longer should we tolerate Staite Murray's romantic myth of the "free" artist. It was a fiction as well as a historical aberration, unknown before 1900.

Both Staite Murray and Wedgwood employed crews of throwers, so it is mainly in style and aesthetics that their pots differ. These antipodal works show that the old criterion of pleasure in making is a faulty way to discriminate between pots. If we continue to define craft in limited ways by fetishizing the craftsperson and the hand, then we will be buffering subjective aesthetic preferences from rational argument. The contemporary craftsperson has a Web site and a blog, yet his or her craft shop talk lags behind. Too many remain tethered to the "handmade" as a criterion, despite David Pye's having pointed out the word as an imprecise and romantic folly 40 years ago.

An earthenware plate made by Samuel Malkin in 1712 provides physical evidence that Wedgwood's futurism has historical precedents. Malkin's slump-molded plate is technophilic, articulating a struggle to integrate technology and tame it. The plate self-consciously refers to another modern domestic invention-a "poor man's clock." Today the earthenware piece lands in the category of folk art, but it shouldn't. We take clocks for granted as schemes to visualize time, but Malkin taught his audience how to see time. The people who owned this plate were transitioning from knowing time through church bells to winding their own timepieces. The ceramic epitomizes the consumers' industrial revolution. It is an example of deeply meaningful design. Malkin used old technology to give his patrons the sensation of participating in modernity. To resort to Disney terminology, his plate imagineered the Enlightenment in numerous British homes.

Technophilic craft offers several provisional conclusions: Craft includes collaborative and interdependent production. It is usually social and should not be conceived as a sequence of creative individuals. Workers in craft tend to rely on each other. Craft is about tinkering with historical, traditional and conventional social habits, but giving old needs new handles. Craft is cumulative, inherited knowledge that tends to be inflexible and adaptable in different ways. Craft lives in "the manufactory," not in the romantic sphere of "the folk." It is pretentious to think of pots being organic simply because they are mined from the earth. So is asbestos. Today's ceramic artists should see the manufactory as their birthright. Of all those producing culture in the contemporary world, it is ceramists who have a right to reclaim The Factory from the oeuvre of Andy Warhol. They are honoring their craft in doing so.