Academic Art vs Folk Art

The NY Times has an interesting article on the curatorial debate between mixing folk art and academic art.  Many museums continue to separate out folk art from academic art, and as stated in the article, in doing so, diminish the importance of folk art.  An interesting debate.

The NY Times reports

But at some of the country’s most influential museums separation remains the rule and has, if anything, been freshly reinforced. Over the past three years four prominent East Coast museums rich in both folk and academic paintings have renovated, expanded and reinstalled their galleries of pre-20th-century American art: the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 2009; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, a year later; the Metropolitan Museum of Art last January; and, in December, the entirely revamped Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven. In each case the folk art is largely relegated to separate quarters and granted only a fraction of the wall space. Whatever the rationale for this segregation, it cannot help conveying a sense that folk art is marginal or inferior.

This is a problem for several reasons. For one thing, pre-20th-century folk art is every bit as good, as a genre, as academic art of the same period, and in some ways far more original and vital. Its strengths lie not in its adherence to reality but in its enlivening deviations from it. For another, the distinction between folk and academic can be blurry, more a matter of degree than either-or. Third, this segregation results in galleries of academic 19th-century American art that are predictable and monotonous, effectively deadening the works on view and shortchanging the viewer.

The quality of folk art has been recognized enough to be heavily collected by most of these four museums, if not heavily shown. In addition to their formal ebullience, so-called naïve efforts convey the raw desire for art that prevailed in the early years of this country, when museums and art academies were virtually nonexistent. They exemplify an insistent sense of American can-do, the instinctive pursuit of art and, in a way, happiness.

As it stands, galleries of 18th- and 19th-century American art proceed in a highly predictable fashion: Hudson River School paintings in one gallery, genre paintings in another, colonial and Revolutionary period portraits in a third. The goal seems to be galleries as homogeneous as possible, so as not to confuse viewers. “You don’t want to shake the snow globe too much,” was how a curator at a fifth East Coast museum put it to me. Au contraire. The snow globe definitely needs shaking.

Source: The NY Times