Folk Art and Folk Design
Inward Making for Personal Satisfaction
I think a lot about a specific way of thinking about art that comes from The Plenitude, by Rich Gold. This book is a manifesto about multidisciplinary creativity and about what it means to live in a modern society that is built around the creation and accumulation of stuff. Everyone should go read it! But right now I’d like to introduce you to Gold’s way of thinking about art.
Three Art “Hats”
Gold considers there to be three different approaches to creating art. All art is the combination of some mixture of each of these approaches.
- “high art” — someone who is an Artist has Visions that they bring out into the world via the expression of their art. They seek Truth and Beauty and Transcendence. The best high art stays relevant for a very long time, because it gets at some core aspect of humanity. This is why the elite pay lots of money for high art. These artists work entirely from the vision that comes from within them; to alter that vision according to whims of the outside world is seen as an affront to the sanctity of the art. The artifact that comes out of making high art is priceless and can’t be replicated.
- “pop art” — someone who makes pop art listens to the emotions and desires of their audience, not so much to inner visions. They try to make things that will speak to as many people as possible. They spend lots of money to create something and then sell many replicas of it to the masses for a small amount of money. Think of an Avengers movie. This art won’t necessarily stay relevant for a long time, but it may speak to many people during the moment when it is relevant.
- “folk art” — someone who makes folk art is doing it for themself and their friends and family. They make art because it is satisfying, because it makes them feel whole. This kind of art is ephemeral. A person who paints watercolors on the weekends is doing folk art. A person who noodles on a guitar when they get home from work is doing folk art.
Gold posits that folk art is currently somewhat lost to those of us living in the Plenitude (our modern, stuff-oriented society). Consider musicking. At one point in time, it was common for families to gather after dinner to play music together. These days, someone who enjoys playing music is immediately steered toward pop art (make a band; become a DJ; sell lots of things and make money!) or high art (study at conservatory; join the top orchestra!). But there is still much value in just making music for the pure enjoyment of making music.
Yes, this might be a tired old rhetoric at this point. Still, I find it useful to think about. In my own life, most of my most satisfying experiences with musicking came once I stopped treating it as an activity I was pursuing in search of something else. This idea of folk art really resonates with other people I talk to as well! So I think it’s a useful lens to think with.
Folk Design = Folk-Artfully Doing Design
Design is the infusion of art and engineering practices. Any way of making art can also be infused into a way of doing design. (And Artful Design, with its focus on the practical philosophy of aesthetics, might be a good lens for noticing the ways in which this happens and advocating for new ways of doing it.)
So — Folk Design is a new term I’m coining. It means, doing design for the pure satisfaction of going through the process, to create things that are used and enjoyed only by people in your immediate, local context.
When my dad makes dozens of wooden bowls in his workshop, each one artfully unique, only to display them proudly around his house, he is doing folk design.
When a person spends hours decorating their apartment to make it special for a birthday party, they are doing folk design.
When I create musical virtual environments for myself that foster calm and make me feel like my emotions are understood, I am doing folk design.
(Side note: you can also think about “pop design” and “high design”, and combinations of the three. A VR experience might approach “high design” if it really artfully understands some aspect of humanity, or might approach “pop design” if it was made to be mass-marketed.
Perhaps my favorite example of “high design” might be this juicer, which is “truly iconic” and “revolutionary” and comes from the visions of its creator, sketched “during a holiday by the sea in Italy, on a pizzeria napkin”. In real life, the juicer is unwieldy and basically useless. Does that understand and reflect some core aspect of the plenitude?)
Folk art and folk design are practices I’m trying to be more aware of and include more in my day-to-day life. One of the ways I folk art is by playing bluegrass music with my friends on occasion.
How do you folk art or folk design?
~Jack
