Maine folk art
After browsing through a maine gallery/art museum guide and discovering a vast majority of the prints were paintings of lighthouses, coasts, and streams I went into a rant about craft versus art that has been met, so far, with blank stares, and vehement disagreement. It was a good reminder that I have both unpopular and necessary opinions. I’m not about to say that art and craft have different skill sets, I just disagree with the consensus that paintings are automatically art, regardless of intent and subject matter. Masterfully crafted furniture is still craft to most, because of its utilitarian value. It doesn’t seem like the utilitarian value of stereotypical imagery should be ignored because of the medium used to create it alone. Using a camera to snap pictures of landmarks doesn’t translate to art, nor using words for non-fiction make it literature, so why are all things created with paint and canvas automatically art?
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of things out there that fit this category of wrongfully accused art, and I have seen paintings of lighthouses that can be legitimately interpreted as art, it’s just that the majority of these reguritations of maine-centric iconography are designed, entirely, to be a source of income, which for me, is a function that pushes the creative output of a person into the realm of craft. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with even mediocre craft as long as it is presented as craft instead of fine art. I’m not about to submit the sock puppets I made with kids or the hastily painted wooden paddles I snagged at the craft store around the way to an art museum unless I plan on having a good laugh at the expense of the writhing self-importance people attach to artifacts presented under the guise of art. You shouldn’t peruse gallerys and museums assuming everything in there is, legitimately, and without a doubt, art. You should, instead, approach such places with the same hopeful skepticism you’d feel walking into a cryptozoology museum. There could be legitimate stuff worth considering behind those doors, or it could be a pile of junk collected by closed-minded fanatics.
