From Tom Lubbock’s review of last year’s exhibition Folk Archive: Contemporary Popular Art from the UK, which discusses the politics of determining which forms of folk culture get to be art (among other things), and actually uses the term ‘vernacular creativity’, this is a great list:

I write about things that appear in art galleries, and other bona fide art contexts. I do not write about crop circles. I do not write about the kind of sculptures that people make from junk and put in their front gardens. I do not write about painted eggs, decorated cakes, floral arrangements, sandcastles, snowmen, guys, scarecrows, fairground signs, trade-union banners, demonstrators’ placards, houses covered in Christmas decorations, shop displays, roadside memorials to car victims, carnival floats, community murals, drawings on the backs of dirty vans, graffiti, tattoos, ornamented crash helmets, home-made shrines to Elvis and Di, topiary, bottle-top mosaics, or lost-cat notices pinned to trees. I do not write about these things, however well they are done. But now, for one week only, I will.

[update 15/05]

In photography, see also Kodak and the Rise of Amateur Photography:

In 1998, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organized the exhibition Snapshots: The Photography of Everyday Life, 1888 to the Present, and in 2000 the Metropolitan Museum presented Other Pictures: Anonymous Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection. Both exhibitions featured a myriad of photographs that, through some technical error—a tilted horizon, an amputated head, a looming shadow, or inadvertent double-exposure—achieved a strange and unexpected visual charm. Removed from their original context in the family album, these anonymous vernacular photographs take on new meanings, inviting interpretation as a uniquely modern form of folk art.

Around the traps lately:

Feeding my growing and almost-totally-phd-related obsession with the seductive mystery of vernacular photography and the curation and exhibition of the found photograph (not always the same thing, but both concepts that have begun to operate as magnets for popular enthusiasm and interest lately): the abandoned photo museum, BigHappyFunHouse (‘found photos. free pie.’), leading me to bookmark for later reading Geoffrey Batchen’s Each Wild Idea, as well as browsing Object Not Found, and Squidoo on vernacular photography as an area of popular collecting.

All of which leads to questions about questions of ‘production’ and ‘consumption’ (and, perhaps, ‘produsers‘), and causes me to consider vernacular photography’s texts and contexts and uses and meanings, all over again.

The resonant qualities of Hobby Princess‘s craft manifesto a little while back have stuck with me and caused me pay attention to Anne’s collection of crafty, knitted, handwoven links; as well as her series of thoughtful posts about things; one of which quotes Adam Gopnik on Shaker furniture, about which he says:

The Shakers made objects that look like objects, and that follow a non-human law of design.

This doesn’t mean that the Shaker objects are ‘inhuman’ in the sense of being cold. They aren’t cold. The brooms and clocks and boxes create an atmosphere of serenity, loveliness, calm certainty. But these are monastic virtues rather than liberal ones. We miss the radical edge of Shaker art if we don’t see that it is not meant to be ‘humanistic’.”

I am down with monastic virtues in precisely this way and so many others right now. Can anyone recommend a silent retreat where you get to have books and ipods and don’t have to be indoctrinated into any particular religion?

Oh, wait, that’s what my office is supposed to be.