Expand to see the excerpts on "Folk Art" from Encarta and Britannica:
Encarta (Folk Art):
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The Western world has long distinguished between the highly structured teachings of the academies that produce the fine arts and the orally transmitted traditional arts, created by and for the artistically less sophisticated. In the conservative view held by many folklorists, for a work to qualify as folk art it must be part of a long-standing tradition, must be learned from an active practitioner, and its genre, style, and technique should be those of an isolated culture, such as that of the Amish or whalers.
In the United States and Canada the concept of folk art is far less restrictive. In the normal usage of museums, dealers, collectors, and the general public the key word is nonacademic—art that has developed outside, but not necessarily uninfluenced by, the arts taught in art schools. In fine art the idiosyncratic generally is admired, whereas anonymity of style is characteristic of folk art, in that it expresses an aesthetic for a specific group that includes the artist and the artist’s immediate audience.
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Britannica (Folk Art):
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Although the definition of folk art is not yet firm, it may be considered as the art created among groups that exist within the framework of a developed society but, for geographic or cultural reasons, are largely separated from the cosmopolitan artistic developments of their time and that produce distinctive styles and objects for local needs and tastes. The output of such art represents a unique complex of primitive impulses and traditional practices subjected both to sophisticated influences and to highly local developments; aside from aesthetic considerations, the study of folk art is particularly revealing in regard to the relationship between art and culture.
