alt Hacker NewsMy mum knits and while yes the skill ceiling is still high no I don’t think it goes as high as art and music which is literally up to like virtuoso, unattainable levels
Knitting has a lower skill ceiling doesn’t mean knitting or design is easy. I know that well, my mum ran a knitting shop and still works on patterns part time. She still knits a lot of stuff for us and it takes a lot of skill and work
But it’s not Glenn Gould on piano, is it? It’s not playing Bach fugues
> I don’t think it goes as high as art and music which is literally up to like virtuoso, unattainable levels
There is a very old, very relevant observation that when men do something we call it "art" and when women do it we call it "craft".
I don't think it makes a lot of sense to compare a performative art like playing an instrument to a constructive art like knitting because the skillsets are so different. It's like trying to decide if ice cream is better than stand up comedy.
But I do think you can reasonably compare constructive arts like painting and knitting. For those, there are two aspects: coming up with the design for what you want to make, and implementing that design. Historically, the latter was given more weight than the former. The most famous painters of the Renaissance mostly just painted pictures of normal people, but it was the execution of those paintings that made them famous. Today, thanks to the invention of reproductive technology like cameras, we mostly prize originally of thought over execution. Andy Warhol is not a particularly skilled painter. (One way to think of the modern conception of "high art" versus "low art"—think Damien Hirst versus Thomas Kinkade—is exactly the distinction between concept and execution.)
Given all that, I would the best knitting designers on the same level as the best furniture designers or portrait painters. Most knitting is deliberately not conceptual, so it's hard to compare it to explicitly conceptual art. But if you think anything can reasonably be called art when it is mostly focused on quality and difficulty of execution, then knitting is an art with a ceiling as high as any other.
And, to be clear, there are fine artists whose medium is textiles as well. For example: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-10-textile-art...
How you feel about those probably reflects mostly how you feel about much of modern art. But I don't see any reason it should be considered a lower rung of art than other sculpture media just because it uses fibers and not metal or glass.