We all know about job-title inflation in business. Companies with five presidents and 100 vice-presidents. Or the company where I was the vice-chairman and my duties consisted pretty much in their entirety of attending a 20-minute meeting every day.

But it also happens in the creative professions. Like the people we used to call "decorators" who now demand to be called "interior designers." Or record producers who reinvent themselves as "sound artists."

I've been thinking about the vanity of creative nomenclature because the American Craft Museum in New York has just reinvented itself -- as the Museum of Contemporary Arts and Design.

This is the fourth time since the museum was founded, just 46 years ago, that it has changed its name.

The museum director says they pretty much had to change the name since, she says, "The boundaries between art, design and craft have broken down."

Yes; sure. But for all that boundary-breaking, I think it's still very possible -- and very useful -- to redraw the basic bright lines between craft and art.

Works of craft are objects that have real utility, as clothing or bowls or furniture or whatever. And they are hand-made -- works fabricated and shaped by an individual human using tools, not a machine stamping out hundreds or thousands of units.

As opposed to works of art: works of art may be hand-crafted objects, but they don't have any real-world utility. That's why they're art. The usefulness of Art is all in the mind -- which is to say, a work of art should provoke thoughts or emotions, but it isn't supposed to do anything.

Of course, the real reason the American Craft Museum changed its name to the Museum of Contemporary Arts and Design is because it had self-esteem issues.

These days, "craft" is the matronly middle-American sister of Art -- Art, who dresses all in black and lives in a cool downtown loft, and sneers.

Not that the craft we're talking about here is the kind of pipe-cleaner Christmas-tree ornaments and macramé tea cozies and decoupage plant holders that your great aunt makes. Craft at its finest comprises the work of great 20th century creators like Annie Albers, whose exquisite modernist still blow me away 75 years after she made them, or George Nakashima's singular furniture. And their various hundreds of creative descendants working today.

And despite the museum's fancy new name, the people at the institution formerly known as the American Craft Museum know what craft is, and know that they still operate an institution devoted to its celebration.

I find this re-branding a little pathetic, like when a girl named Patsy in my 9th grade class started calling herself Patricia, because it was more "sophisticated."

In fact, it's doubly sad. Because in the world of serious Art today, craftsmanship -- the nuances of a well-painted line or well-cut shape, of working fluently with materials -- is not prized highly enough.

So at a time like this one, shouldn't a museum that celebrates hand-worked craftsmanship be frank about its distinctive commitment instead of being embarrassed, and trying to pretend it's something it isn't?

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