what is Collingwood’s theory

OBJECTIONS TO COLLINGWOOD’S THEORY
Few might argue with the generality of Collingwood’s suggestion, but the moral tone which underpins his idea of art as a form of self knowledge is used to justify various exclusions to its definition. First, there seems to be no recognition of the authentic pleasures and enjoyment which looking at and engaging with art can bring.
Second, Collingwood does not recognise craft – those objects executed for a purpose – as art proper (Ridley 1998: 10). He continues by suggesting that whilst art may have an element of planning, it may equally be undertaken without a final idea or conception of the finished form. By contrast, any example of craft, such as the making of a table or chair, necessarily requires that its maker has a clear plan of how it will be constructed and what it will look like (Collingwood 1975: 20–22).


Written in the 1940s, Collingwood’s qualitative distinction between art and craft now looks dated, particularly because the art paradigm which he seems to have had in mind is that of painting. But since the 1960s, much art has explored other media or has hybridised existing forms. For example, Grayson Perry (Figure 28, p. 209) has combined the craft associations of ceramics with some of the  expressive and iconographical concerns previously associated with painting. The making of much bespoke Renaissance painting and
sculpture was not just planned in the general sense conceded by Collingwood’s definition, but was highly codified by stipulations regarding size, composition, execution and quality of materials (Baxandall 1988). Whilst it could be argued that such work was still understood and regarded by fifteenth-century contemporaries as indeed a form of craft, by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had been recognised and given ‘fine art’ status.
As Warburton observes (2003: 60–61), if Collingwood’s ideas are taken at face value, religious art, including the St George Icon (Figure 26, p. 200) and Cranach’s Adam and Eve (Figure 20, p. 142), created to arouse devotional feeling, would be relegated to a form of magic or non-art. Collingwood also discounts representational art, suggesting that since it too is undertaken according to a plan of capturing a likeness, it should be understood as a technical or lesser form of art or craft (Collingwood 1975: 42–43).