Art, folklore, bureaucracy and ideology

Abstract

In the Sunday New York Times of July 31, 1983 [1] there was a review of an exhibit of Inuit (Eskimo) art carvings, paintings, and prints ? at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. The main question for the reviewer was whether the works were to be regarded as folk art or fine art. He concluded that they are to be thought of as fine art, partially be? cause the people who made them "appreci? ated" them and "it's the intention that counts," [2] partially because they were selected for the show for their aesthetic rather than their ethnographic interest, but mainly because they have come to command a respectable and steady place on the art market. In effect, we know it is art when a print made by Kenojuak of Cape Dorset can bring a price of $20,000. The New York Times reviewer is suggesting quite seriously and without a hint of irony or self-consciousness that, in our society, art is art precisely when it gets placed on the shelves of the art market. Of course, he was, and is, correct; and that defines our problem. To begin this analysis, we must strip the word "art" of its modern connotations and reduce it to its basic meanings. At base, art is work/play, that is, cultural construction. It is the action and the product of the action of human beings working and making things, transforming the raw materials of nature (sounds, movements, pigments, fibers, stone, etc.) into products considered to be of social use and value. As such, this particular form of work is subject to all the constraints and considerations to which other forms are subject. That is, it is influenced not only by the potentials inherent in the raw materials or by the creativity of the worker-maker, but also by the social relations that con textualize the artist. In particular, this form of work, like all others, is determined by the factors and persons which control the process and its products, and it both reflects and is influenced by the values and the social structure of the society in which it is set and especially, in our civilization, by the values and actions of the people who have the most power. "Art" in our society then, is scarcely to be distinguished from other forms of labor, except that art is characteristically more reflective of emotion, cognition, and other easily identifiable human content than are the other forms. That labor which we have labeled "art" usually has an explicit and readily tapped reference to culture. This is especially so for the language arts, whose raw materials are meaning-laden sounds, and the visual arts, whose basic components are human-referenced forms and images, but it applies also to such genres as music and dance, which proceed in the production and manipulation of human-produced sounds and movements. "Art," then, is work which Toni Flores is Associate Professor of Women's Studies and American Studies at William Smith and Hobart Colleges, New York.