Last week the new Tacoma Narrows Bridge opened to much fanfare — an estimated 60,000 people attended the ribbon cutting festivities.

One of the last suspension bridges to be built in the United States, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge has proven to be a quaint reminder of not only our collective historical memory but also the inherent interconnectivity between elegant utility and artistic beauty.

In an article for Tacoma's City Arts magazine, Michael Sean Sullivan compared the bridge's finishing touches to "the rigging of sails on the last clipper ship" and the footage of its predecessor's demise to a cinematic masterpiece.

"The Nov. 7, 1940, [news] film of Gertie's dance of disaster and cataclysmic failure — which couldn't have been better if Buster Keaton had somehow collaborated with Steven Spielberg — is a standard text, still visually spellbinding, an accidental special effects sequence that stops the show and drops the jaw every time," Sullivan said.

This year, a more modern Tacoma institution is attempting to distill the purely artistic elements of a medium weighed down by the steel bonds of practicality. In June, the Museum of Glass unveiled Mining Glass, an exhibit which showcases the great strides glass has made in the art world since the Studio Glass movement of the 1960s and '70s. The museum celebrated its fifth anniversary this month.

Although it could be argued that all forms of high art are derived from decorative or functional applications, it is only recently that the medium of glass has begun to garner the respect readily bestowed upon sculpture, painting and other traditional art forms.

In Mining Glass, eight internationally known artists, many of whom had never worked with glass before, participated in a free word association of sorts, each contributing a piece of artwork meant to illustrate a particular "narrative theme." Such topics include artifice, identity, landscape, desire, boundaries, excess, intersections and enchantment.

Most of the artist-word combinations are natural fits. However, the results are often unexpected.

Take "Landscape," for example. Who better to illustrate this concept than Maya Lin, whose architectural work on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the Columbia River Basin's Confluence Project both seamlessly blend natural and man-made elements?

Paradoxically, "Dew Point," a collection of flattened glass orbs, is notable mostly for its lack of landscape. This was likely an intentional decision by Lin, a committed environmentalist. Perhaps it was meant to evoke in the viewer a desire for the lush green forest that these dew drops should be accentuating instead of a cold, hard museum floor.

Many of the pieces incorporate material other than glass, most notably Wim Delvoye's series of stained glass windows that prominently feature X-rays of his friends, ahem, "cavorting."

From a distance, the carnal and holy elements blend in a seemingly benign, albeit haunting, fashion. Only upon closer inspection does one notice the blurring of lines between the subjects' tongues, the contrastingly crystal-clear lines of gastrointestinal tracts and other such traditionally intimate and internal details.

Although a diverse and interesting collection, Mining Glass does seem to fall short when it comes to dispelling traditional criticisms, which dismiss glassmaking as mere technical wizardry.

Lin's "Dew Point," for example, was created by the Museum of Glass's experienced Hot Shop team, albeit under Lin's direct supervision. Such teamwork is common practice in this field.

Additionally, "Dew Point" and Teresita Fernandez's "Eruption (Large)," which is essentially a flat plane covered with glass beads, lack the complexity necessary to engage the viewer's emotional or cognitive facilities to a degree that would raise them above the status of mere decoration.

In the end, it would seem that the debate surrounding glassmaking is just an extension of the age-old tension that exists between craftsmanship and art. Can you have craftsmanship without art?

Or art without craftsmanship?

And that in itself is a fruitless chicken-and-egg-caliber tail-chaser. Looking out through steel cables at the swirling waters beneath the newly completed Tacoma Narrows Bridge, it is hard not to conclude that the two are inextricably intertwined.