"Folk" and "fine," like "popular"and "elite," are ideological words that folklorists use to help classify the kinds of human beings that exist in the world and the kinds of art they produce. Henry Glassie's The Spirit of Folk Art, published in 1989, purports to be a twentieth-century American's articulation of the sacred power of human expressivity, but eventually all of its conclusions favor the Romantic over the Postmodern, the "then" over the "now," "there" over "here," and "folk" over "fine."

While reading Glassie's book, stuggling to understand whatever distinctions may exist between the arts of "the folk" and those of "non-folk," I was reminded of Peter Greenaway, the British enfant terrible of non-narrative filmmaking, whom I had long considered one of few emergent mythographers of the formerly-Romantic, post-industrail West. In the context of Glassie's descriptions, Greenaway suddenly metamorphosed in my imagination into its bellwether folk artist as well.

Glassie defines the folk artist primarily by situating him or her within a traditionally Religious context; Greenaway's work defines the artist as a person whose mundane experience in the world intersects with the sacred, usually with terrifying consequences. What is the difference between these perspectives, I asked myself. Is it enough to justify separate vocabularies, separate worldviews, for their anallytically separated proponents? During his visit to Indiana University in April 1997 to talk about his new film, The Pillow Book, I suggested to Peter Greenaway that viewing his work as folk art might be worth thinking about. The overflow crowd, constituted largely of sophisticated feminist critics and seasoned film-buffs, tittered with laughter as if to say, "We all know that folk art has nothing whatever in common with the avant garde!" But Greenaway, nodding vigorously to accept the label, said, "Well, you seem to be a member of my ideal audience."

Best known to U.S. audiences as the director of The Cook, theThief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1990), Greenaway's films had never been classified by anyone as folk art. Notwithstanding, my instinct to pursue the convergences between Glassie's Romanticism and Greenaway's Postmodernism led me to examine the 1991 film, Prospero's Books, in the light of this new insight, and in so doing to contrast it with a film generally interpreted as being more in line with Glassie's Romanticism than anything Greenaway has ever made, Koyaanisqatsi by Ron Fricke.

In a sense, this essay is a long-delayed response to a remark Glassie made in 1990: If a thing can be called true, or good, or beautiful, it cannot be found in the postmodern world. I disagree, but more urgently now that more of my time is spent in classrooms with college freshmen than in conversation with tenured Folklore scholars. After surviving America's 1990's brand high schools, fragmenting and dehumanizing to an extent that most of us fully fail to grasp, they have earned the right to create art in a world that has not by definition precluded it as a possibility in their lives.

Postmodern Folk and the Sacred

From time to time, the set of assumptions we hold to be central to the discipline of Folklore is subjected to renewed scrutiny. One of the forms it is taking among the current generation is a look at the assumption that Folklore succeeded in 1971 in prescribing the scope of its inquiry to embrace "the artistic process in small group situations" as delineated by Dan Ben-Amos in "Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context."[el1]1 As valuable as this proposal proved in effecting a truce in the definitions wars of the 1960's, because of its necessary exclusion of inquiry into the profound effects (and affects) of mass-communication and mass-production in the West in our lifetimes, there are those of us who believe that this definition no longer encompasses lived experiences of folklore in the world we live in, nor will it suffice to do so in the next century. While it is twenty years since Alan Dundes attempted to broaden Folklore's social base to theoretically include any persons who share "some form of collective plurality," academic folklorists have stopped far short of embracing such a radical idea, preferring in practice to nod in Dundes' direction with attitudes ranging from respect for his devotion to keeping Folklore alive as its traditional subjects become sparser on the land to derision at his suggestion that "a folk group could consist of as few as two individuals."2

The ever-shifting questions of who comprises the folk and what its lore have been with us since the beginning and are unlikely to be fully answered any time soon.3 In the current environment, however, the received response has sent many of us to study cultures other than our own in the hope of finding "real folklore," i.e., artistic expression still unpolluted by industrial or electronic mediation. But for those of us who remain here the notion that the growing portion of the world's peoples whose communications occur in technologically mediated environments (e.g., television, film, the internet) are thereby excluded from the category of the folk, and by implication that our communications are thereby insufficiently artistic (or simply insufficiently valuable) to qualify as lore, has become increasingly difficult to defend. It is commendable that the academic study of folklore continues to align itself ideologically with the best, most humanistic insights and inspirations of nineteenth-century Romanticism. But why must our honorable orientation imply the perverse idea that life in Postmodernism requires that we lose our memory of all that the Romantics learned? A century and a half has elapsed since Europe's most impassioned and aristocratic Romantic, Richard Wagner, offered a provocative but overlooked response to what still remains our most crucial question. I include it here in its entirety in the hope that it will remind us that "the folk" must constitute a far more generous category than the late twentieth-century academy insists upon, and that the lore it contains is not of necessity limited to those categories laid down for us either by Ben-Amos or by those of our disciplinary lineage who were Wagner's contemporaries.

Who is then the Folk?- It is absolutely necessary that, before proceeding further, we should agree upon the answer to this weightiest of questions.

"The Folk" was from of old the inclusive term for all the units which made up the total of a commonality. In the beginning, it was the family and the tribe; next, the tribes united by like speech into a nation. Practically, by the Roman world-dominion which engulfed the nations, and theoretically, by the Christian religion which admitted of naught but men, i.e., no racial, but only Christian men the idea of "the People" has so far broadened out, or even evaporated, that we may either include in it mankind in general, or, upon the arbitrary political hypothesis, a certain, and generally the propertyless portion of the Commonwealth. But beyond a frivolous meaning, this term has also acquired an ineradicable moral one; and because of it, in times of stir and trouble all men are eager to number themselves among the People; each one gives out that he is careful for the People's weal, and no one will permit himself to be excluded from it. Therefore in these latter days the question has been frequently broached, in the most diverse of senses: Who then is the People? In the sum total of the body politic, can a separate party, a particular fraction of the said body, claim this name for itself alone? Rather, are we not all alike "the People," from the beggar to the prince?

This question must therefore be answered according to the conclusive and world-historical sense that now lies at its root, as follows:-

The "Folk" is the epitome of all those men who feel a common and collective Want. To it belong, then, all of those who recognise their individual want as a collective want, or find it based thereon; ergo, all those who can hope for the stilling of their want in nothing but the stilling of a common want, and therefore spend their whole life's strength upon the stilling of their thus acknowledged common want. For only that want which urges to the uttermost, is genuine want; but this want alone is the force of true need; but a common and collective need is the only true need; only he who feels within himself a true need, has a right to its assuagement; but only the assuagement of a genuine need is necessity; and it is the Folk alone that acts according to necessity's behests, and therefore irresistibly, victoriously, and rightly as none besides.4

If we rewrite Wagner to allow for his use of the term "men" to account for us all, it is his dual conviction that "genuine want" is the defining characteristic of a collective plurality and that all who feel it and work to assuage it are agents in a profoundly moral endeavor that challenges our putatively modern sensibilities. Given these criteria for a definition of the folk, it is appropriate that we should ask: What is the Want of the post-industrial West and who are the men and women who work with their lifetimes' strength to still it? While folklorists are wisely skeptical of domination in the expressive arts as evinced by the proclivities of princes, now, when political rule is so rarely placed unquestioned into their bejeweled hands, it is time to recognize and appropriate the traditional attributes of beneficent royalty-dignity, forbearance, self-possession, and compassion-and dispense them more liberally among the world's untitled (including ourselves) instead of merely restricting the category of the folk to those who never wield any real political power. Art, when it is not locked away with the Crown Jewels but distributed as the wealth that it is, when it acts to still genuine collective Want, concatenates the worlds of the beggar and the prince today-particularly in Postmodernism's increasingly mediated environments--as it has never done before.

Footnotes to Page 1

2. Dundes 1980, p. 13.

3. See Stephen Olbrys' article in the Spring 1998 issue of Folklore Forum.

4. From "The Art of the Future" in Prose Works [1893], Vol. I, pp. 74-5, trans. W.A. Ellis; anthologized in Ellmann and Feidelson 1965, pp. 665-6. London. Emphasis in original.

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