Quotes & Sayings About Folk Art

It's a folk art of sorts, I said to Hoeller, always longing to kill oneself but being kept by one's watchful intelligence from killing oneself, so that the condition is stabilized in the form of lifelong controlled suffering, it's an art possessed only by this people and those belonging to it. — Thomas Bernhard

Saint Joseph, Michigan is a hamlet catered specifically to the tastes of rich, vacationing city folk. In the summer, these wealthy tourists haul their yachts out of storage and settle into their lakeside summer homes. When they aren't oiling up on the beach, they flock to quaint ice cream parlors and overpriced clothing and art stores along Dove Street. Of course, none of the permanent residents of St. Joe can afford to buy anything from those boutiques, but we do get a little pleasure when yuppies get their stilettos stuck in the cracks of our brick-paved roads. Apart from the beach and movie theater, it's our main source of entertainment. — Jennifer Brightside

It isn't a club," I said calmly. "It's a walking stick."
"Six feet long."
"It's traditional Ozark folk art."
"With dents and nicks all over it."
I thought about it for a second. "I'm insecure?"
"Get a blanket." He held out his hand. I signed and passed my staff over to him. "Do I get a receipt?"
He took a notepad from his pocket and wrote on it. Then he passed it over to me. It read: Received, one six foot tall traditional Ozark walking club from Mr. Smart-Ass. — Jim Butcher

Folk music is not so much a body of art as it is a process, an attitude, and a way of life; its distinguishing features lie not within the songs themselves, but in the relations of those songs to a folk culture. — Sam Hinton

When I was 19 I went to art school. I had six months of teaching myself to play baritone ukulele under my belt, so was sort of a novice folkie ... I was singing folk songs at that time. — Joni Mitchell

Folk art has never been much about politics; it's about action and utility. — Cass McCombs

The novel is the first art form that is an honest-to-god commodity. That's what makes it different from both high art and folk art. — Leslie Fiedler

I have never denied my background or my culture. I have taught my child to embrace her Mexican heritage, to love my first language, Spanish, to learn about Mexican history, music, folk art, food, and even the Mexican candy I grew up with. — Salma Hayek

And this is the origin of pop music: it's a professional music which draws upon both folk music and fine arts music as well. — Pete Seeger

A game may be as integral to a culture, as true an object of human aesthetic appreciation, as admirable a product of creativity as a folk art or a style of music; and, as such, it is quite as worthy of study. — Michael Dummett

All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. — W.E.B. Du Bois

Folk parapsychology, an art and science designed to enable people to make effective use of their psychic talents — Isaac Bonewits

It's taken folk a while to come around, hasn't it? Even the boys in the band weren't too sure about the whole art thing. They just wanted me to concentrate on the music. But they respect it now. — Ron Wood

The rosy enthusiasms and hopes of 1925," Alain Locke said ten years later, "were. . . cruelly
deceptive mirages." The ghetto was revealed in the thirties as "a nasty, sordid corner into which
black folk are herded - a Harlem that the social worker knew all along but had not been able to
dramatize. . .
There is no cure or saving magic in poetry and art
for. . . precarious marginal
employment, high mortality rates, civic neglect," Locke concluded. It was this Harlem, the
neighborhood not visible "from the raucous interior of a smokefilled, jazzdrunken cabaret," the
Harlem hidden by the "bright surface. . . of. . . night clubs, cabaret tours and. . . arty magazines,"
that was devastated by the Depression. — Gilbert Osofsky

High art is researched more than folk art, and museums more than front yards. Yet I would make the case that the minutiae of everyday life deserve our attention; the micro-concerns of the normal round do not make the front pages, but I would hazard a guess that the "trivia" of life, the small things, are probably of more interest to most people most of the time than the macro-concerns of international politics and economics. — Anthony Synnott

It seems to me that being psycho-analysed is essentially a process where one is forced back into infantilism and then rescued from it by crystallising what one learns into a sort of intellectual primitivism-one is forced back into myth, and folk lore and everything that belongs to the savage or undeveloped stages of society. For if I say to you: I recognise in that dream,such and such a myth; or in that emotion about my father, that folk-tale; or the atmosphere of that memory is the same as an English ballad-then you smile, you are satisfied. As far as you are concerned, I've gone beyond the childish, I've transmuted it and saved it, by embodying it in myth. But in fact all I do, or you do, is to fish among the childish memories. of an individual, and merge them with the art or ideas that belong to the childhood of a people. — Doris Lessing

In spite of their obvious differences, folk art and popular art have much in common; they are easy to understand, they are romantic, patriotic, conventionally moral, and they are held in deep affection by those who are suspicious of the great arts. Popular artists can be serious, like Frederick Remington, or trivial, like Charles Dana Gibson; they can be men of genius like Chaplin or men of talent like Harold Lloyd; they can be as uni versal as Dickens or as parochial as E.P. Roe; one thing common to all of them is the power to communicate directly with everyone. — Gilbert Seldes

Until we can insert a USB into our ear and download our thoughts, drawing remains the best way of getting visual information on to the page. I draw as a collagist, juxtaposing images and styles of mark-making from many sources. The world I draw is the interior landscape of my personal obsessions and of cultures I have absorbed and adapted, from Latvian folk art to Japanese screens. I lasso thoughts with a pen. I draw a stave church or someone from Hello! Magazine not because I want to replicate how they look, but because of the meaning they bring to the work. — Grayson Perry

This is the kind of touch they like: folk art, archaic, made by women, in their spare time, from things that have no further use. A return to traditional values. Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want? On — Margaret Atwood

Printed prose is historically a most peculiar, almost an aberrant way of telling stories, and by far the most inherently anesthetic: It is the only medium of art I can think of which appeals directly to none of our five senses. The oral and folk tradition in narrative made use of verse or live-voice dynamics, embellished by gesture and expression
a kind of rudimentary theater
as do the best raconteurs of all times. Commonly there was musical accompaniment as well: a kind of one-man theater-of-mixed-means. — John Barth

Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent. — W.E.B. Du Bois

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination. — Theodor Adorno

Hip-hop is the last true folk art. — Mos Def

Religion should be subject to commonsense appraisal and rational review, as openly discussible as, say, politics, art and the weather. The First Amendment, we should recall, forbids Congress both from establishing laws designating a state religion and from abridging freedom of speech. There is no reason why we should shy away from speaking freely about religion, no reason why it should be thought impolite to debate it, especially when, as so often happens, religious folk bring it up on their own and try to impose it on others. — Jeffrey Tayler

That's the thing about a folk tale: It is always addressing incredibly key issues about how you should live and what the right thing to do is, which is really what I'm the most interested in - like the questions that religion takes on. And I think that, for those of us that aren't religious, we need, or I need, art that stimulates the same kind of thinking about what it is to be a mensch, or a good man, things like that. — Benh Zeitlin

Not that I am totally obsessed with merchantry!" said Glasswort Groof as she led them in an artful circle round the Market. "Goblins are well-rounded, though you'd never think it from the dastard tales folk tell of us. For example, I enjoy stamp collecting as well as haggling. The stamps that pay our letters' way Above are works of art, practically bigger than the envelope! I've an early Mallow three-kisser with a rampant rhinocentaur on it in pewter paint. Pride of my collection. And it goes without saying I'm quite the gardener. Goblin vegetables pack twice the punch of fruit with half the delicacy of a simpering little apricot. Soon turnips will be all the rage! — Catherynne M Valente

Our appreciation of folk art will strengthen our identities, our pride in belonging to a community. People trained in the creative use of their hands soon acquire skills, excellent craftsmanship which will be the most important measure of how well we can industrialize. — F. Sionil Jose

Photography is the dominant and fascinating and only folk art of the twentieth century. — John Rothenstein

The theatre has always been voraciously omnivorous. Dramatists have always raided every medium to find grist to their mill: myths, folk tales, newspapers, novels, films, works of art of all kinds. — Lee Hall

If Elvis ..is the definition of rock, then rock is remembered as showbiz ... It becomes a solely performative art form, where the meaning of a song matters less than the person singing it. It becomes personality music ... if Dylan ... becomes the definition of rock, everything reverses. In this contingency, lyrical authenticity becomes everything: Rock is galvanized as an intellectual craft, interlocked with the folk tradition ... The fact that Dylan does not have a conventionally "good" singing voice becomes retrospective proof that rock audiences prioritized substance over style ... — Chuck Klosterman

It is said that my art has some typically Nordic features: the curving lines, the convolutions, the magical masks and staring eyes that appear in myths and folk art. This may be. My interest in the dynamics of Jugend style probably also comes into it. — Asger Jorn

I love commercial music! I can dissect it and criticize it with any critic in the business. But without any thought, I just enjoy it. It's folk music. That's what I'm doing, folk music. I'm not intellectualizing it ... and making it into a phoney art form. I'm just doing the music I enjoy. — John Lennon

Sir," said the guard from behind me. "I'd appreciate it if you left your club here."
I paused and looked over my shoulder, He had a gun. His hand wasn't exactly resting on it, but he'd tucked his thumb into his belt about half an inch away.
"It isn't a club," I said calmly. "It's a walking stick."
"Six feet long."
"It's traditional Ozark folk art."
"With dents and nicks all over it."
I thought about it for a second. "I'm insecure?"
"Get a blanket. — Jim Butcher

I love Inuit art, and most anything you would find in a folk art museum, as well as children's art or children's book illustrators or illustrators in general - all the kinds of work that my paintings would draw comparisons to. — Neil Farber

In the United States, many people said you can't have folk music in the United States because you don't have any peasant class. But the funny thing was, there were literally thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who loved old time fiddling, ballads, banjo tunes, blues played on the guitar, spirituals and gospel hymns. These songs and music didn't fit into any neat category of art music nor popular music nor jazz. So gradually they said well let's call it folk music. — Pete Seeger

People need to learn the art of making an argument. Often there is no right or wrong. It's just your opinion vs someone else's opinion. How you deliver that opinion could make the difference between opening a mind, changing an opinion or shutting the door. Sometimes folk just don't know when they've "argued" enough. Learn when to shut up. — J'son M. Lee

I really like working. I can't think of a job I didn't like. I was in an Alvin and the Chipmunks movie, which is not my idea of folk art; but I really enjoyed making it, and everyone was really nice. — Jenny Slate

The only thing I collect is art. I collect it because I like looking at it. A lot of it is really personal stuff that my friends have made, paintings that my husband's mother made, and things that I bought. I buy abstract art on eBay, and I buy some outsider art on eBay, or what is called folk art, I buy a lot of. I have a lot of professional art work as well as more stuff my friends' kids make. To have a wall of art to look at, I feel really surrounded by love, because so much of the work is related to my friendships. — Kathleen Hanna

Jazz is part folk art, part progressive art, — Mulgrew Miller

Valentine
my friends stitched it up with golden thread
like a red
satin pillow they gave me other whole ones too
roses and charms and red candles
milagros to repair the real one
they told me i was no longer allowed to give it away
a pretty pin cushion
a piece of mexican folk art
a hundred beating poems left unanswered
like a thing to wear around the neck
they said you must heal we will protect you
but i sat weeping at the computer forging ahead anyway
with the small stitched thing struggling in my chest
it knew that it had needed to be torn
so that it could recognize and receive the hundred kindnesses
traveling across three thousand miles at the speed of light
a storm of petals and beautiful words and tiny hearts to keep it
company — Francesca Lia Block

Real popular culture is folk art - coalminers' songs and so forth. — Noam Chomsky

I was only a folk singer for about two years ... . By that time, it wasn't really folk music anymore. It was some new American phenomenon. Later, they called it singer/songwriters. Or art songs, which I liked best. Some people get nervous about that word. Art. They think it's a pretentious word from the giddyap. To me, ... the word art has never lost its vitality. — Joni Mitchell

Mama, Mama, help me get home
I'm out in the woods, I am out on my own.
I found me a werewolf, a nasty old mutt
It showed me its teeth and went straight for my gut.
Mama, Mama, help me get home
I'm out in the woods, I am out on my own.
I was stopped by a vampire, a rotting old wreck
It showed me its teeth and went straight for my neck.
Mama, Mama, put me to bed
I won't make it home, I'm already half-dead.
I met an Invalid, and fell for his art
He showed me his smile, and went straight for my heart.
-From "A Child's Walk Home," Nursery Rhymes and Folk Tales — Lauren Oliver

Gujarat is truly vibrant. Be it handicrafts, folk music, art, costumes or food - the state offers the best of everything. — Shreya Ghoshal

It is often said, rather flatly, that Russian ballet was a mix of French, Scandinavian (through the teacher Johansson), and Italian sources - that Russia, through Petipa, absorbed all of these and made them her own. This is certainly true; but what really changed ballet was the way it became entwined with Imperial Russia herself. Serfdom and autocracy, St. Petersburg and the prestige of foreign culture, hierarchy, order, aristocratic ideals and their ongoing tension with more eastern folk forms: all of these things ran into ballet and made it a quintessentially Russian art. — Jennifer Homans

If for us culture means museum and library and open house and art gallery, for them it meant the activities and amenities of everyday life ... The rift is ... between "folk" culture, where the unschooled can be wise, and print culture, which enslaved the other senses to the eye. — Nick Joaquin

I absolutely love American folk art, can't get enough of it. — Lara Spencer

As a Black woman filmmaker I feel that's my job: visibility. And my preference within that job is Black subjectivity. Meaning I'm interested in the lives of Black folk as the subject. Not the predicate, not the tangent.[These stories] deserve to be told. Not as sociology, not as spectacle, not as a singular event that happens every so often, but regularly and purposefully as truth and as art on an ongoing basis, as do the stories of all the women you love. — Ava DuVernay

I think what makes the Byrds stand up all these years is the basis in folk music. Folk music, being a timeless art form, is the foundation of the Byrds. We were all from a folk background. We considered ourselves folk singers even when we strapped on electric instruments and dabbled in different things. — Roger McGuinn

There is no real way to categorize McLean's 'American Pie' for its hybrid of modern poetry and folk ballad, beer-hall chant and high-art rock. — Douglas Brinkley

Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things. — Walter Benjamin

When we teach a child to sing or play the flute, we teach her how to listen. When we teach her to draw, we teach her to see. When we teach a child to dance, we teach him about his body and about space, and when he acts on a stage, he learns about character and motivation. When we teach a child design, we reveal the geometry of the world. When we teach children about the folk and traditional arts and the great masterpieces of the world, we teach them to celebrate their roots and find their own place in history. — Jane Alexander