place between the camera and the scene itself, leaving any human audience
altogether to one side.
A second mode of partial resistance and partial accommodation to the
traditions of“high”fine art has developed in recent attention to folk arts and
crafts. Some serious composers such as Dvorak, Stravinsky, and Copeland,
not to mention Beethoven, Schumann, and Bach, have long made use of
traditional folk melodies and motifs. But with the advent of recording tech-
nologies it has become possible for many people to pay attention to trad-
itional folk practices of music in their own right. Delta blues, Scottish
Highland reels, the Aissawa music of Morocco, and Senegalese Tabala Wolof
are all now widely available in recordings, along with music in hundreds of
other styles. These styles of music are objects of serious attention in their
own right. They retain in many cases closer connections with dance and with
lived experience than do the traditions of high art music in the West.
Entertainment, fun, and vernacularism seem to mix easily with one another,
at least for certain musicians and audiences, without worrying much about
somber self-interrogation or the cultivation of the human in the forms of
satire and elegy.
In the visual arts, attention to quilt making and woodcarving, among
other folk practices, as serious disciplines of art continues to increase. Tribal
masks, traditional pottery, and jewelry all claim places in museums of art as
well as of folklore. If there sometimes seems to be a bit of escapism from the
traditions of high art and into hobbyism, there are nonetheless serious
vernacular developments of form, thought, and gesture in these media. It
has been a major project of some forms of feminist thought and practice to
reestablish the interest of the kinds of artistic production–cooking, table-
setting, weaving, jewelry making, and knitting, among many other forms of
practice–that were traditionally seen as women’s work. Reclaiming these
practices as vehicles of art as well as of domestic use is another way of
interrogating and developing the possibilities of meaningful production in
relation to social actuality. We are, rightly, more aware than we used to be of
both how central the labors of women are to social reproduction, how
confined within certain spheres of social reproduction women have often
been, and of the interest and value of what they have managed to produce.
This awareness is entirely compatible with taking an interest also in hitherto
neglected works of“high”art produced by women working in traditional
disciplines and in contemporary work by women. There is a risk, of course,276 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art