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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 17 January 2022 and 13 May 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Alex Ciochetti ( article contribs). Peer reviewers: Sophialeis, Daniel Justic, Adillon243.
Headers taken down a level
I am not in agreement that the text is written in a personal style. I have identified the different aspects of this subject area, and presented them accurately, using references and quotes from the experts in the field. This is a complex topic, with 6 main identification points. These have been summerized at the beginning and then have been expanded on in the main area. There is nothing argumentative about it, rather it is a clarification of some difficult words, i.e. what is art, what is beauty, what is folk. I am a degreed folklorist and this text has been reviewed by the president of the American Folklore Society and found good. For specific points of criticism, please list them and we can discuss them individually. Smithriedel 03:02, 5 February 2019 (UTC)
It's not really on my beat, but the old "Folk art" has been entirely replaced and redirected to Folk art objects - a jump from 7kb to 80kb. A very short & odd Folk arts has also been set up. The new article has many obvious issues, even on a cursory scan. The same editor created Mexican-American folklore in December, which also had big problems. He doesn't seem very responsive. The old page got avge. 335 views pd, so it should be decent. What we have now seems to me a rambling top-level essay on the theory of folk art, with almost no discussion of even broad categories of actual examples, nor any new images. It seems unlikely to be what the reader wants. Meanwhile, Folk arts seems to draw from one of those long UNESCO committee-written screeds that were being dumped around the place. Johnbod ( talk) 02:39, 5 February 2019 (UTC)
Smithriedel 04:17, 5 February 2019 (UTC) Thanks Johnbod for giving me specifics to respond to.
1) I did not create the text on the page Mexican-American folklore in December. That text landed on my page Folklore, without context, and I simply moved it to its own page. I do not know anything about that topic, so I can't fix it. Maybe you should delete it.
2) The very short Folk arts page is to separate all the different forms of Folk arts. Dancing, singing, and objects. My page only deals with the material folk arts, i.e. objects. Any title Folk art will get muddled with both intangible and tangible folk art forms. I created that page to distinguish and point to the different forms, each of which has their own page.
3) All folk art objects are tied to a specific region and culture. I have put a list somewhere to include links to pages of regional folk arts. Maybe the list needs to be made more prominent. In this page, I cannot pick any one folk art form, because they are literally all over the globe.
4) I don't do pictures, but other people love to add images. Just not my thing.
5) I would be fine with a rename of the page to Folk art (tangible objects), or Folk art theory keeping the Folk art on the front of the title. The old article is inaccurate and wrong, please don't use it again. You cannot have a single article on material Folk art. You can only have articles on different cultural folk art forms.
6) I have no problem working with you to clean this up. I have written other folklore pages, and they have all stayed quite stabile. This one uses a lot of quotes and citations, because it is quite difficult to pin down, between what is art and what is beauty, etc. I looked for consensus in the professional literature. Smithriedel 04:17, 5 February 2019 (UTC)
I also wrote the pages Folklore, Folklore studies, Jokes, etc. I know my stuff in folklore. In cultural heritage, the rules are a little different. I would be very happy with a title change to Folk art (tangible objects). Have to go to bed now, please don't do anything drastic until I am up again tomorrow. Smithriedel 04:35, 5 February 2019 (UTC) Smithriedel 04:35, 5 February 2019 (UTC)
I've given the article more of a read, and have specific and general points:
Smithriedel 03:53, 6 February 2019 (UTC) I would like to take these points one at a time, and try to sort them out.
1) there may be an American bias, and we could retitle this article as American Folk art. The topic is too large to include all of Europe and the British Isles. It could be that some of the information is applicable for all areas, but for the moment I am fine with making this just American folk art.
2) I think your corrections for the "Workshops and Apprentices" are fine. Actually I was not thinking of pottery at all for this. I was thinking of the blacksmith, carpenter, cabintry, thatching, leathergoods, basketry. Things that you need on the farm regularly but don't necessarily have the equipment or skills or time to make yourself. You would go into the village workshop and order a one-off. These were the village workshops where the family also farmed, but the majority of the income came from these specialized services. I would be surprised if villages in Europe and the British Isles did not have a similar setup (read Thomas Hardy), but if you feel strongly to limit this to North America, it is true there also. Pottery did not come up in the sources I was using, it was the other handicrafts.
3) I think pottery needs its own page if you feel strongly about it. My goal was not to single out any single art form, but rather to find the commonality in all forms of folk art, across all media.
I'd suggest we start with these points, and get clarity on them. Tomorrow I will make comments on the further points. Let me know what you think. Smithriedel 03:53, 6 February 2019 (UTC)
Smithriedel 21:29, 6 February 2019 (UTC)CONCERNING THIS The opening line: "Folk art objects are a subset of material culture, and include objects which are experienced through the senses, by seeing, feeling, smelling and tasting (foodways)" bites off a deal more than you go on to chew - foodways I believe count as "intangible", even though you can feel and taste them. And "feeling" is ambiguous here. Better to restrict the subject clearly to physical objects of some durability that can be considered as visual art.
Smithriedel 21:29, 6 February 2019 (UTC)
Ok - I think some of it could be copied back to a general "Folk art". Johnbod (talk) 16:30, 6 February 2019 (UTC)
I think this page needs to be retitled to avoid confusion. The page "Folk art" will continue to be the primary page for the topic. This page contains more in depth info that would be important for a more extensive discussion of the individual characteristics. I am thinking that maybe "Concepts in folk art" might work. But I am looking for other suggestions.
Once the page has a new title, I can delete the top level points that got moved to the primary page. I will also write a new lead to connect the title with the content here. thanks Smithriedel 15:14, 7 February 2019 (UTC)
Smithriedel 18:58, 7 February 2019 (UTC) the lists on these 2 pages, and the established category lists on folk art you mention above need a lot of cleanup and work. For the two new pages which I written for folk art, I put the lists in, hoping that other people will add new links. My goal was to define a workable structure for the topic, with place holders to add new info as it was identified.
Because the new page titled Folk art objects is long and more detailed than the general user might want, I have moved appropriate generalized text to this page, replacing text that has been considered sub-standard. We should get this page stablized, before working to improve the longer page of Folk art objects. That page probably needs to be reshaped and retitled, so that it fits in as an extension to this more basic and general page. Smithriedel 21:52, 6 February 2019 (UTC)
Worked on htis in my sandbox, and have copied the complete text over. I moved all text from the new page Folk arts, which I created. That page can be deleted. Now we have 2 pages on the topic. Folk art and Concepts in Folk art. Smithriedel 16:01, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
Smithriedel 23:08, 8 February 2019 (UTC) I think another word would be better than local. I would use "fine art" tradition of that culture. Local implies like "in the neighborhood", "down the street". Choose what you think is best. Smithriedel 23:08, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
Really all this needs to go to Folk arts, which is exactly the right place. We've discussed this before - we need to stick to the WP convention that "art" = "visual art". Plus you still aren't getting how to write for an encyclopedia - we obviously have vast trees of articles on Folk music, folk dance, and folk story, but you don't link to any of them in the text, just another list at the end - nor anything anywhere to "folk story". Johnbod ( talk) 19:27, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
What I was thinking was to remove / delete the page Folk arts. I am not in agreement that "art" = "visual art", the title "Performing arts" contradicts that. I was working off the same assumptions as that page. I think 2 pages is enough on this topic (main and concepts), and would like to keep "Performance folk arts" as a sub-topic in the main page. Otherwise it is hard for users to keep track, as they don't have a tree diagram in their head. I'll fix the link to folk story. 160.111.254.17 ( talk) 19:38, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
160.111.254.17 ( talk) 19:55, 12 February 2019 (UTC) work within an established cultural framework. Yes, outsider art, outlier art, visionary art etc. are noted for artists working outside the culture, as singletons on the edges of a society. Also, the identity of folk artists are known within their region. A potter in Roman Cologne signed all his work with a thumb print. Folk artists are not anonymous, a common misconception. 160.111.254.17 ( talk) 19:55, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
Smithriedel 15:16, 14 February 2019 (UTC) thanks for clarifying this terminology. I was unaware of the WP conventions with these two terms. Smithriedel 15:16, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
This section, which is referenced only to Kubler, seems to me to considerably distort what he says. He makes a sharp distinction between "useful" objects and "useless" ones = works of art. But he also recognises that the work of art can have a religious, political, or social utility, and I think that he accepts that merely being decorative also can fulfill a useful purpose. Hence (contrary to what the section here implies) "useless" forms like paintings in fact show considerable continuity over very long periods of time. In any case, the whole area of such distinctions between art & craft, and fine, decorative and applied art have been greatly discussed in recent decades, and the trend (perhaps overdone) has been to reject such distinctions. The American/European definitional differences also play a part. Nor is Kubler I think at all interested in this distinction, if he recognises it at all. So I think this section is heavily overstated, and the position set out (no doubt held by some) is not supported by the single reference used. Johnbod ( talk) 20:04, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
/info/en/?search=User:Smithriedel/sandbox2 . I think the listing is achieved in the headings themselves, and this second list just seems redundant. Is this what you were thinking?Smithriedel 13:58, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
I have completed listing the short key characteristics in my sandbox2 page. User:Smithriedel/sandbox2. Not too happy with it because it does not give enough info on each point. Here is my thinking. 1) reader gets the same listing in the contents box. 2) Originally I added for each point both an expanded description and a applicable professional quote from a recognized expert (Riegl, Bronner, Vlach, etc.). I did this on purpose, so that even the cursory reader sees these important names in the discussion. I could just remove these experts, save them for the Concepts page. That gives the reader skimming the text the impression that it is all clear and simple. Adding expert voices, even at this top level, gives reader a taste of the complexity of these issues. 3) I understand that you are working with style models and promoting consistency in WP, however sometimes the content needs to determine the style. I find these expanded paragraphs on each point, including a single expert, is appropriate for this topic even here at the beginningSmithriedel 18:42, 18 February 2019 (UTC).
Smithriedel 16:41, 20 February 2019 (UTC)Unfortunately, we have run down the clock on this project. I can no longer work on it due to time and travel restraints. I have also lost confidence in this editing process. When each sentence is tagged as a problem of one kind or another, it becomes an exercise in futility.
Why is this picture attached to this article? None of the pottery looks remotely like folk art. Even if the pottery could be seen as folk art by an absurdly broad view of the term, the main thing illustrated is what a pottery stand looks like in a Romanian market. Unfortunately the picture shows up as a thumbnail for this article which makes this choice of image even worse.
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Folk art article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Archives: 1 |
This
level-4 vital article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 17 January 2022 and 13 May 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Alex Ciochetti ( article contribs). Peer reviewers: Sophialeis, Daniel Justic, Adillon243.
Headers taken down a level
I am not in agreement that the text is written in a personal style. I have identified the different aspects of this subject area, and presented them accurately, using references and quotes from the experts in the field. This is a complex topic, with 6 main identification points. These have been summerized at the beginning and then have been expanded on in the main area. There is nothing argumentative about it, rather it is a clarification of some difficult words, i.e. what is art, what is beauty, what is folk. I am a degreed folklorist and this text has been reviewed by the president of the American Folklore Society and found good. For specific points of criticism, please list them and we can discuss them individually. Smithriedel 03:02, 5 February 2019 (UTC)
It's not really on my beat, but the old "Folk art" has been entirely replaced and redirected to Folk art objects - a jump from 7kb to 80kb. A very short & odd Folk arts has also been set up. The new article has many obvious issues, even on a cursory scan. The same editor created Mexican-American folklore in December, which also had big problems. He doesn't seem very responsive. The old page got avge. 335 views pd, so it should be decent. What we have now seems to me a rambling top-level essay on the theory of folk art, with almost no discussion of even broad categories of actual examples, nor any new images. It seems unlikely to be what the reader wants. Meanwhile, Folk arts seems to draw from one of those long UNESCO committee-written screeds that were being dumped around the place. Johnbod ( talk) 02:39, 5 February 2019 (UTC)
Smithriedel 04:17, 5 February 2019 (UTC) Thanks Johnbod for giving me specifics to respond to.
1) I did not create the text on the page Mexican-American folklore in December. That text landed on my page Folklore, without context, and I simply moved it to its own page. I do not know anything about that topic, so I can't fix it. Maybe you should delete it.
2) The very short Folk arts page is to separate all the different forms of Folk arts. Dancing, singing, and objects. My page only deals with the material folk arts, i.e. objects. Any title Folk art will get muddled with both intangible and tangible folk art forms. I created that page to distinguish and point to the different forms, each of which has their own page.
3) All folk art objects are tied to a specific region and culture. I have put a list somewhere to include links to pages of regional folk arts. Maybe the list needs to be made more prominent. In this page, I cannot pick any one folk art form, because they are literally all over the globe.
4) I don't do pictures, but other people love to add images. Just not my thing.
5) I would be fine with a rename of the page to Folk art (tangible objects), or Folk art theory keeping the Folk art on the front of the title. The old article is inaccurate and wrong, please don't use it again. You cannot have a single article on material Folk art. You can only have articles on different cultural folk art forms.
6) I have no problem working with you to clean this up. I have written other folklore pages, and they have all stayed quite stabile. This one uses a lot of quotes and citations, because it is quite difficult to pin down, between what is art and what is beauty, etc. I looked for consensus in the professional literature. Smithriedel 04:17, 5 February 2019 (UTC)
I also wrote the pages Folklore, Folklore studies, Jokes, etc. I know my stuff in folklore. In cultural heritage, the rules are a little different. I would be very happy with a title change to Folk art (tangible objects). Have to go to bed now, please don't do anything drastic until I am up again tomorrow. Smithriedel 04:35, 5 February 2019 (UTC) Smithriedel 04:35, 5 February 2019 (UTC)
I've given the article more of a read, and have specific and general points:
Smithriedel 03:53, 6 February 2019 (UTC) I would like to take these points one at a time, and try to sort them out.
1) there may be an American bias, and we could retitle this article as American Folk art. The topic is too large to include all of Europe and the British Isles. It could be that some of the information is applicable for all areas, but for the moment I am fine with making this just American folk art.
2) I think your corrections for the "Workshops and Apprentices" are fine. Actually I was not thinking of pottery at all for this. I was thinking of the blacksmith, carpenter, cabintry, thatching, leathergoods, basketry. Things that you need on the farm regularly but don't necessarily have the equipment or skills or time to make yourself. You would go into the village workshop and order a one-off. These were the village workshops where the family also farmed, but the majority of the income came from these specialized services. I would be surprised if villages in Europe and the British Isles did not have a similar setup (read Thomas Hardy), but if you feel strongly to limit this to North America, it is true there also. Pottery did not come up in the sources I was using, it was the other handicrafts.
3) I think pottery needs its own page if you feel strongly about it. My goal was not to single out any single art form, but rather to find the commonality in all forms of folk art, across all media.
I'd suggest we start with these points, and get clarity on them. Tomorrow I will make comments on the further points. Let me know what you think. Smithriedel 03:53, 6 February 2019 (UTC)
Smithriedel 21:29, 6 February 2019 (UTC)CONCERNING THIS The opening line: "Folk art objects are a subset of material culture, and include objects which are experienced through the senses, by seeing, feeling, smelling and tasting (foodways)" bites off a deal more than you go on to chew - foodways I believe count as "intangible", even though you can feel and taste them. And "feeling" is ambiguous here. Better to restrict the subject clearly to physical objects of some durability that can be considered as visual art.
Smithriedel 21:29, 6 February 2019 (UTC)
Ok - I think some of it could be copied back to a general "Folk art". Johnbod (talk) 16:30, 6 February 2019 (UTC)
I think this page needs to be retitled to avoid confusion. The page "Folk art" will continue to be the primary page for the topic. This page contains more in depth info that would be important for a more extensive discussion of the individual characteristics. I am thinking that maybe "Concepts in folk art" might work. But I am looking for other suggestions.
Once the page has a new title, I can delete the top level points that got moved to the primary page. I will also write a new lead to connect the title with the content here. thanks Smithriedel 15:14, 7 February 2019 (UTC)
Smithriedel 18:58, 7 February 2019 (UTC) the lists on these 2 pages, and the established category lists on folk art you mention above need a lot of cleanup and work. For the two new pages which I written for folk art, I put the lists in, hoping that other people will add new links. My goal was to define a workable structure for the topic, with place holders to add new info as it was identified.
Because the new page titled Folk art objects is long and more detailed than the general user might want, I have moved appropriate generalized text to this page, replacing text that has been considered sub-standard. We should get this page stablized, before working to improve the longer page of Folk art objects. That page probably needs to be reshaped and retitled, so that it fits in as an extension to this more basic and general page. Smithriedel 21:52, 6 February 2019 (UTC)
Worked on htis in my sandbox, and have copied the complete text over. I moved all text from the new page Folk arts, which I created. That page can be deleted. Now we have 2 pages on the topic. Folk art and Concepts in Folk art. Smithriedel 16:01, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
Smithriedel 23:08, 8 February 2019 (UTC) I think another word would be better than local. I would use "fine art" tradition of that culture. Local implies like "in the neighborhood", "down the street". Choose what you think is best. Smithriedel 23:08, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
Really all this needs to go to Folk arts, which is exactly the right place. We've discussed this before - we need to stick to the WP convention that "art" = "visual art". Plus you still aren't getting how to write for an encyclopedia - we obviously have vast trees of articles on Folk music, folk dance, and folk story, but you don't link to any of them in the text, just another list at the end - nor anything anywhere to "folk story". Johnbod ( talk) 19:27, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
What I was thinking was to remove / delete the page Folk arts. I am not in agreement that "art" = "visual art", the title "Performing arts" contradicts that. I was working off the same assumptions as that page. I think 2 pages is enough on this topic (main and concepts), and would like to keep "Performance folk arts" as a sub-topic in the main page. Otherwise it is hard for users to keep track, as they don't have a tree diagram in their head. I'll fix the link to folk story. 160.111.254.17 ( talk) 19:38, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
160.111.254.17 ( talk) 19:55, 12 February 2019 (UTC) work within an established cultural framework. Yes, outsider art, outlier art, visionary art etc. are noted for artists working outside the culture, as singletons on the edges of a society. Also, the identity of folk artists are known within their region. A potter in Roman Cologne signed all his work with a thumb print. Folk artists are not anonymous, a common misconception. 160.111.254.17 ( talk) 19:55, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
Smithriedel 15:16, 14 February 2019 (UTC) thanks for clarifying this terminology. I was unaware of the WP conventions with these two terms. Smithriedel 15:16, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
This section, which is referenced only to Kubler, seems to me to considerably distort what he says. He makes a sharp distinction between "useful" objects and "useless" ones = works of art. But he also recognises that the work of art can have a religious, political, or social utility, and I think that he accepts that merely being decorative also can fulfill a useful purpose. Hence (contrary to what the section here implies) "useless" forms like paintings in fact show considerable continuity over very long periods of time. In any case, the whole area of such distinctions between art & craft, and fine, decorative and applied art have been greatly discussed in recent decades, and the trend (perhaps overdone) has been to reject such distinctions. The American/European definitional differences also play a part. Nor is Kubler I think at all interested in this distinction, if he recognises it at all. So I think this section is heavily overstated, and the position set out (no doubt held by some) is not supported by the single reference used. Johnbod ( talk) 20:04, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
/info/en/?search=User:Smithriedel/sandbox2 . I think the listing is achieved in the headings themselves, and this second list just seems redundant. Is this what you were thinking?Smithriedel 13:58, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
I have completed listing the short key characteristics in my sandbox2 page. User:Smithriedel/sandbox2. Not too happy with it because it does not give enough info on each point. Here is my thinking. 1) reader gets the same listing in the contents box. 2) Originally I added for each point both an expanded description and a applicable professional quote from a recognized expert (Riegl, Bronner, Vlach, etc.). I did this on purpose, so that even the cursory reader sees these important names in the discussion. I could just remove these experts, save them for the Concepts page. That gives the reader skimming the text the impression that it is all clear and simple. Adding expert voices, even at this top level, gives reader a taste of the complexity of these issues. 3) I understand that you are working with style models and promoting consistency in WP, however sometimes the content needs to determine the style. I find these expanded paragraphs on each point, including a single expert, is appropriate for this topic even here at the beginningSmithriedel 18:42, 18 February 2019 (UTC).
Smithriedel 16:41, 20 February 2019 (UTC)Unfortunately, we have run down the clock on this project. I can no longer work on it due to time and travel restraints. I have also lost confidence in this editing process. When each sentence is tagged as a problem of one kind or another, it becomes an exercise in futility.
Why is this picture attached to this article? None of the pottery looks remotely like folk art. Even if the pottery could be seen as folk art by an absurdly broad view of the term, the main thing illustrated is what a pottery stand looks like in a Romanian market. Unfortunately the picture shows up as a thumbnail for this article which makes this choice of image even worse.