What White House Memes Reveal About Modern Folk Art
And what do Pre-Columbian forgeries have to do with it?
I’d like to point out a small detail in “Apocalypto,” a very good movie directed by Mel Gibson. The film follows Jaguar Paw, a Mesoamerican hunter captured by Maya warriors, as he’s brought to the city to die a horrible death. As our enslaved hero enters the Mayan city center, the camera pans to a pile of crude figurines, presumably for sale to marketgoers.
Tourist tchotchkes, in other words.
We tend to give old things the artistic benefit of the doubt. There is something undeniably awesome about going to a museum and seeing thousand-year-old relics, carved by long dead hands.
As it turns out, 50-year-old relics can easily inspire the same awe.
Brigido Lara was born in 1939 or 1940 in Mexico. Lara was arrested in 1974 for possession of looted Pre-Columbian ceramics. He reportedly proved his innocence from his cell by requesting some clay, then crafting identical copies of the supposedly ancient loot he’d been hoarding. His replicas were taken to the expert archeologists — whose testimony had seen Lara arrested in the first place — who confidently announced that, indeed, these too were ancient ceramics.
Lara claims to have created over 40,000 forgeries prior to his arrest and subsequent employment by the state Anthropology Museum in Xalapa. He now signs his ceramics, which he calls “original interpretations.”
All this to ask: How much artistic prestige do we bestow on old art just because it’s old?
I’m not sure I’d really go ga-ga for this if I saw it in a modern art museum.
(Yes, there is cooler Native American art from the Pre-Columbian period — I purposely chose a crappy looking objects to illustrate that even crappy looking objects might seem less crappy if they’re old.)
Part of the problem I’m grasping at here is folk art versus fine art. Fine art is made by experts who undergo formal training. These are the professionals contracted to carve caryatids for Greek temples, or those hired by wealthy patrons to paint them into gospel scenes. The fine art of most civilizations is admirable, at the very least, on the basis of technique. Folk art is more difficult to evaluate.
Folk art is what it sounds like. Art made by the masses with the materials on hand, plausibly for religious purposes (though attributing the unknown to “religious purposes” is sort of an anthropological cop-out).
See: The Bronze Age figurines brought to the Aegean island of Keros to be smashed and buried.
A more recent example of folk art: Those guys hawking spraypainted sunset scenes along the boardwalk in Los Angeles or San Diego.
But that’s not the dominant folk art of our time. When was the last time you got out a can of spray paint and whipped up a portrait of Tahiti?
What, then, is the dominant folk art of our time? And will posterity be kind to it?
I think I have an answer, at least to the former.