Craft work is skilled work: any kind of craft must involve the application of a technique. We wouldn't attribute a high level of craftsmanship to a machine which produced thousands of coffee mugs in an hour. Craft implies the application of human intelligence and the application of the human hand.

The concept of craft is historically associated with the production of useful objects and art, at least since the 18th century, with useless ones. In fact, if an object is made demonstrably useless, if, to cite a famous example, you take a teacup and line it entirely with animal fur, it has to be considered as a work of art, because there is nothing else left to consider it as.

The crafts aren't arts, according to a idea which found fullest expression in the aesthetics of the great Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant. Works of art, Kant said, are 'intrinsically final': they appeal purely at the level of the imagination and aren't good for any practical utility, except the cultivation of the human spirit.