Folk vs. Elitist Art

“The attempt to reach the public directly through ‘popular’ art assumes that criticism is artificial and public taste natural. Behind this is a further assumption about natural taste which goes back through Tolstoy to Romantic theories of a spontaneously creative ‘folk.’ These theories have had a fair trial; they have not stood up very well to the facts of literary history can experience, and it is perhaps time to move beyond them. An extreme reaction against the primitive view, at one time associated with the ‘art for art’s sake’ catchword, thinks of art in precisely the opposite terms, as a mystery, an initiation into an esoterically civilized community. Here criticism is restricted to ritual masonic gestures, to raised eyebrows and cryptic comments and other signs of an understanding too occult for syntax. The fallacy common to both attitudes is that of a rough correlation between the merit of art and the degree of public response to it, though the correlation assumed is direct in one case and inverse in the other.”

From “The Anatomy of Criticism” by Northrop Frye

I find myself in the strange situation of disagreeing with Frye in the first insistence. There are many instances of folk art being the creative inspiration for high art. Classical composers would take folk melodies and turn them into symphonies.  Two of the four big, fat Chinese classic novels were collected from folk stories about the Monkey King and the rebel bandit Song (China’s Robin Hood). The superhero movies work as well as they do because comic book writers and artists experimented with these characters for a century before movie technology caught up enough to capture them. I am not saying that all high art comes from folk art, only that enough does that the theory is useful.

As for art as a mystery, here I agree that the idea is overblown PR for artists who don’t wish to, or perhaps cannot, explain themselves. All minds collect data about our universe, correlate that data, and express their conclusions. People express those conclusions in different ways and specialize in different subject matters, but the basic brain anatomy is the same. I’ve read thousands of books and had uncountable experiences from the dull as dirt to the rare and wonderful, and they are all grist for the mill of my muse. The inspiration of an artist is little more surprising than that of a scientist.

Emerson had a different take on this question. He believed in the creativity of the common folk, and that poets were simply those brave enough to go around telling everyone what everyone quietly worried about. Emerson and the Transcendentalists wanted a philosophy, a literature, and even a religion suitable for democracy. All other philosophies, arts, and religions had been born in a state of monarchy, and assumed a top to bottom status, while Emerson wished for a reverse, which is why his educational system stressed the release of students’ creativity…it is troublesome that our government now wish to establish an educational system based upon testing, much like that of China and Japan (whose system of education is originally based upon China’s pre-Communist educational philosophy). 

What Frye wants is a system of art that is neither mysterious nor democratic, but a system of experts. This makes perfectly good sense, and not just because it keeps academics like him employed. I do use book reviews to help me figure out what books to read, almost as often as friends’ recommendations, and I trust my friends’ judgment because I trust their taste and critical judgment; taste might be to critical judgment what intuition is to rational thinking: a subconscious, quick and simple version of the latter.

I do enjoy reading books more if I understand them, and if a book is too far from my personal experience some expert help is useful (the first time I purposely read criticism was to understand Sylvia Plath). But unlike Frye, I accept the fact that this system of experts, as useful as they are, will always be an overlay over the hustle and bustle of writers inspired by the culture around them, the bubbling folk art from which high art and commercial art alike arise.