The following is just a short excerpt from my thesis.  If you would like to read the read the entire document, then I urge you to visit the Columbus College of Art & Design's Packard Library located at 60 Cleveland Ave., Columbus, Ohio 43215.

Chapter 2 - Alchemy

     At this time the definition of what studio glass is, will be important for the rest of this thesis.  The definition of studio glass, that will be used through out this

document, is the the more classic ideal of glass shaped in a hot glass studio.  Not the over arching definition of any glass formed in any kind of working studio

​conditions(4)... hot shop, kiln casting, and flameworking are all valid ways to work with glass.  However for the the purposes of this document, the hot shop and what 

​it produces is what is under scrutiny.​



     Can studio glass be successfully used as a vehicle for art?  That is the main driving question of this thesis.  Is it possible?  The short answer is yes.  A near

perfect example of studio glass being thought of as art is the glassware produced by Josiah McEhlney.  However Mr. McEhlney is a special case, as he is the only

studio glassblower to be featured in the Whittney Biennial.  His approach is to layer the action of story telling on top of traditional studio glass forms to create

historical fictions(5).  He then lets the viewer decide the fiction’s accuracy in the cannon history.  This type of layering is not the normal protocol for studio glass. 

Most studio glass will fall under the stigma of craft, or even possibly decoration.  To reinforce this ideal, Bruce Metcalf gave a lecture entitled “The Art Glass

Conundrum” at the annual Glass Art Society (GAS) Conference, held in Corning; New York in 2009.  At this particular gathering, Mr. Metcalf declared “… most studio

glass is not convincing sculpture, and if it’s not convincing sculpture… it’s not convincing art”(6).  For Mr. Metcalf to say this is interesting as he is himself a jeweler

by trade.  So we have a craftsman telling other glass craftsman that the majority of them don't make art, and at the annual glass conference no less.  The crux of Mr. Metcalf’s argument relies on the multitudes of drips, tear drops, floppy bowls, and the more technically brilliant glass objects in the field today(7).  The seduction of the material coupled with the seduction of technical virtuosity, on a very utilitarian level, is what can root studio glass very firmly into craft and not art.



     No one is going to deny the beauty of glass as a material.  It’s that exact beauty that has been seducing people, like moths to a flame, for centuries.  It is also that same exact beauty that has many modern glassblowers claiming they are artists without any additional layers of meaning to their work beyond the 5,000 year history of process in their craft.  While there is nothing wrong with that, fine craft can be it’s own reward and people can connect to a finely crafted object readily, a finely crafted object is not necessarily “art”.  It’s this type of thinking that Bruce Metcalf was condemning at the 2009 GAS conference.  Looking at Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (8)we can use the notion of Universal Delight as the basis of a beginning dialogue with the beauty of glass as a material in that Kant views delight as…

“… the beautiful is that, which apart from concepts, is
represented as the object of a Universal Delight…”​



That glass is a beautiful material goes without saying, and in it’s final state is an almost perfect example of beauty as defined by the Oxford American Dictionary(9) which states beauty as…

“… the quality of being very pleasing to the senses,
an excellent example of something(emphasis, mine)…”