Folk Art Quotes

• Hip-hop is the last true folk art.

  Mos Def

  Art, Hip Hop, Lasts

  "The Artist Formerly Known as Mos Def" by Mark Anthony Green, www.gq.com. September 11, 2012.

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

  Walter Benjamin

  Art, Kitsch, Teach

  Walter Benjamin, Michael William Jennings, Brigid Doherty (2008). “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media”, p.209, Harvard University Press

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• 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 José

  Gratitude, Appreciation, Art

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• Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Domination, Folks

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.204, Verso

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• Art and works of art do not make an artist; sense and enthusiasm and instinct do.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Art, Enthusiasm, Instinct

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• To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.

  Will Durant

  Art, Communication, Half

  Will Durant, Ariel Durant (1961). “The Story of Civilization: The Age of Reason begins, 1558-1648”

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

  Cass McCombs

  Art, Action, Folks

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• 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

  Art, Eye, Style

  Asger Jorn, Per Hovdenakk, Stine Høholt, Arken museum for moderne kunst (Ishøj, Denmark), Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst (Amstelveen, Netherlands) (2002). “Asger Jorn”

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• Real popular culture is folk art - coalminers' songs and so forth.

  Noam Chomsky

  Song, Art, Real

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• 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

  Art, Patriotic, Men

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• Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.

  Steven Pinker

  Art, Human Nature, Scholar

  "A biological understanding of human nature". Edge Interview, www.edge.org. September 18, 2017.

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• 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

  Art, Children, Book

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.

  Plato

  Art, Plato, Philosophical

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• Photography is the dominant and fascinating and only authentic folk art of the twentieth century.

  John Rothenstein

  Photography, Art, Century

  "The world of Camera".

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• 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

  Art, Children, Mexican

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• I absolutely love American folk art, can't get enough of it.

  Lara Spencer

  Art, Enough, Folks

  "ABC's Lara Spencer can't wait to host 'Antiques Roadshow' in 2004". Interview with Mary Daniels, articles.chicagotribune.com. July 20, 2003.

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• Rock ’n roll is really swing with a modern name. It began on the levees and plantations, took in folk songs, and features blues and rhythm. It's the rhythm that gets to the kids – they're starved of music they can dance to, after all those years of crooners.

  Alan Freed

  Music, Dance, Song

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• I feel funny about owning art. I don't really want to say: "Wow, come and see my Monet - it's in a dark room at the bottom of my cellar."

  Baz Luhrmann

  Art, Dark, Want

  "Portrait of the artist: Baz Luhrmann, director". Interview with Laura Barnett, www.theguardian.com. October 25, 2010.

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• When I left the theater… I was thinking that I’d seen a classic of American dance. It confers a mythic dimension on ordinary aspects of our daily lives – it’s unfaked folk art. The dancers, crashing wave upon wave into those falls, have a happy insane spirit that recalls a unique moment in American life – the time we did the school play or we were ready to drown at a swimming meet. The last time most of us were happy in that way.

  Arlene Croce

  Art, Fall, School

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• Jazz is part folk art, part progressive art.

  Mulgrew Miller

  Art, Jazz, Progressive

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• 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

  Mother, Art, Wall

  "Kathleen Hanna on buffalo chicken, Destiny's Child, and the sketchy things she did to McDonald's apple pies". Interview with Marah Eakin, www.avclub.com. February 10, 2015.

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• I always thought the women of my age group got short shrift because the women's liberation movement came slightly after. You look at the yearbooks and you see the future homemakers of America - hurray for that - but you also see them in the engineers club. You see minority kids as student body presidents at a time when everyone was supposed to be terminally racist. Yearbooks are genres; they're also folk art, folk documentation.

  Kevin Starr

  Art, Kids, Yearbook

  Source: www.chicagotribune.com

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• 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 own 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

  Art, Drawing, Style

  "Grayson Perry lassos thoughts with a pen" by Grayson Perry, www.theguardian.com. September 19, 2009.

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• 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

  Appreciation, Art, Creativity

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