Fridge Art?

This week in class we briefly discussed the importance of context to understanding and appreciating images. The American Folk Art Museum, located right next to MOMA is an excellent example of this idea (especially the "Approaching Abstraction" exhibition), as well as many other concepts introduced in Chapter 2 of Practices of Looking.

1. Works exhibited in the "Approaching Abstraction" exhibition are predominantly composed of basic materials such as crayon (http://www.folkartmuseum.org/?p=folk&t=images&id=4670), marker (http://www.folkartmuseum.org/index.php?p=folk&t=images&id=4671) , and ballpoint pen (http://www.folkartmuseum.org/index.php?p=folk&t=images&id=4675). These displayed works seem similar to what a mother would post on her fridge of her children's rudimentary artwork. But because it is displayed in an accredited institution like The American Folk Art Museum, visitors look at the art in admiration, genuinely appreciating the crayon and marker sketches.

2. This also plays into the idea of taste that we discussed. Fine art is generally seen as oil or pastel paintings, charcoal sketches, sculpture, etc. This kind of art is seen as high class and tasteful. One would not think art connoisseurs would see the art displayed in the "Approaching Abstraction" exhibition as tasteful.

3. Lastly, (and this applies to all of the art on display at The American Folk Art Museum) the folk art plays into the idea of encoding and decoding. Here is an exert from the museum's website:

American folk art may be remarkable for the cultural clues it holds, but these often become elusive when the artworks are removed from the context of their creation. For the better part of the twentieth century, however, this is exactly how folk art has been perceived, following a museum model that was established early in the century and that initially provided a useful and reliable framework for organizing material that was then outside the art historical mainstream. Exhibitions were arranged by fine arts categories of sculpture, painting, and decorative arts or divided into thematic categories such as work, play, landscape, and home. Through these presentations, it was certainly possible to appreciate the development of form within each medium and even to understand folk art’s reflection of human concerns. But the artworks were largely divorced from their own history and the myriad forces that imbued them with deeper meaning.

Although not discussed in the chapter, this presents a tension between the musuem and the artist. Curators have a vision for how art should be displayed, but at the same time they have a responsibility to the artist to not change or confuse the artist's original meaning of the art.

This idea can be applied to all images in advertisements, because the creator of the artwork may have a different idea for the art then the end result would suggest.