Handmade Art

Paper Summary:

The exhibition "Muffler Men, Munecos, and Other Welded Wonders" at the Fowler Museum is a display of works by Los Angeles-area mechanics who make human figures from mufflers and other auto parts. This paper shows that exhibitions like this demonstrate that there is very little handmade work that is not considered important by today's museums.

From the Paper:

"This type of ethnographic appreciation coexisted peacefully with the interest of artists who looked at such work primarily in aesthetic terms. But, since the 1960s, the work of folk artists has increasingly become the focus of so much attention, and subject to such enormous increases in price, that the supposed local audience for which the folk artist creates her/his work has now expanded to include gallery owners, collectors, and curators whose eager acquisition of pieces formerly assigned little monetary value has turned folk artists from avocational painters, sculptors, and quilters to professionals (Shine 99). As Shine points out, unlike movements within Modernism and postmodernism "contemporary folk art [as a category of art] was fundamentally an invention of collectors, rather than a formal aim or a fellowship of artists" (101). Similarities among works by artists in many cultures seem to derive from the similarity in the available materials rather than from specifically local traditions and folk artists seem to produce work to meet the growing demand."

More papers on Handmade Art:

• Essay # 90247 : "Naked or Nude in Art"
• Term Paper # 119157 : "Art and Aesthetic"
• Research Paper # 146692 : "Behind the Limited Editions Club"

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