What is craft? We all used to know that it was about skill and material. Those in the crafts had real skills - apprenticeship-taught, finely-honed, painstaking knowledge in their fingertips. They had learnt enough about the materiality of clay or fibre or metal to be able to repeat themselves, to produce a set of spoons or a line of carved words that sat well in the hand or weren't wonky. Craft was about producing something well, or giving satisfaction, or respecting the world. It was difficult to be against it even if you didn't care for it: craft was benevolent and slightly beige. It carried with it the vague embarrassments of fervour, memories of overenthusiastic teachers at school.

The problem about this set of views of craft is that is simply out of date. People who would never dream of admitting to being ignorant of contemporary music or dance or fiction seem happy to allow themselves to know nothing of what has happened in craft, to feel that it is permissible not to look at or think about one whole section of the visual arts.

This is partly because of the policing of the boundaries between art and craft. As always, those who care about boundaries seem anxious to prevent cross-border activity. For most art critics, craft is below the salt. Why? Well, craft is a useful foil - it can be seen as old-fashioned, a redoubt against the conceptual. And for some in the crafts, contemporary art seems to be a skill-free arena of aerated play. This view is usually coupled with jealousy - the art-world seems to be a sweet shop of collectors and critics and curators against which to press your aspirational nose.

There has been a long decade of soul-searching, report-writing and conference-giving in the crafts. This has led to the usual set of ghastly neologisms (anyone for “craft art”, “sculptor in clay” or, God help us, “material-specific auteur”? ).

For a good part of the 1990s I told anyone who would listen that if the crafts could write about themselves with interest and conviction then people would be won over. For your information this strategy doesn't work.

What is true is that there has been radical change, not in the word about craft but in craft itself. Craft occupies a different kind of space. There are makers (this is the self-descriptor of choice of potters and weavers and should be used at dinner parties) who have a different sense of scale and ambition. It is enlivening to see makers who interpret and curate. You can find makers who use more than one kind of material or who use their skills not as a theatrical display of achievement (how did they do that, how long did that take?), but as the lyrical embodying of ideas.

This is craft that does not seek to hold up the world, as Richard Sennett implies it should in his recent book The Craftsman. It doesn't buttonhole you. What it does do is to see and feel the world again. It is in fact bloody good art. And some of it you can touch.

Jerwood Contemporary Makers is at the Jerwood Space, 171 Union Street, London SE1, from Thursday, until July 20, then touring. Edmund de Waal is Professor of Ceramics at the University of Westminster, a potter and a writer

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