Craft, Collingwood plato.stanford.edu/entries/collingwood-aesthetics argued, is skilled work purposefully directed toward a final product or designed artifact; the ‘craftsman knows in advance’ what the end product will look like. The craftsman’s foreknowledge is required by the very idea of a craft. . . . . .

Art is in this respect an entirely different domain. Like craft, art requires the exercise of skill and technique, but the artist does not have anything resembling the craftsman’s precise foreknowledge of the end state -- the finished art work -- when he starts out. A proper art, Collingwood argued, is open during the creative process to a partial or complete change of direction or goal -- open even to losing any sense of goal at all. The artist may change his mind, seize a new possibility, or make a surprising turn. If a poet begins to write a hymn in praise of Fidel Castro and ends -- even against his initial intention -- with a work about the and ends -- even against his initial intention -- with a work about the odiousness of poems in praise of dictators, we do not see the poet as any less competent or the poem in that respect any less a work of art.