How Folklore Shaped Modern Art: A Post-Critical History of Aesthetics

This book addresses key debates about criticality in art by tracing the delimitations between folkloric and fine art production that have affected the modernist, postmodernist and contemporary eras in different ways. It looks at the tendency to equate highly valued art with the portrayal of an underlying critical reality, which, it is argued, is a legacy of Kantian philosophy. It takes a chronological approach to the key debates concerning uncritical cultural production, identifying how a ‘folkloric’ notion of culture has been used as an uncritical ‘other’ in the history of modern and postmodern art. This narration of the fine art/folkloric divide concludes with the claim that art in the contemporary era has undergone a folkloric turn in which postmodern methodologies are accompanied by an overhauled notion of the critical address.