Folk art depended on agrarian or simple-commodity social relations that no longer exist

Evidence

Specialization, and everything esoteric that accompanies it (special training, collective division of labor, unique technologies, a guild or professionalist mentality, along with the simple indifference that accompanies activities from which we are excluded), characterizes both high art and mass culture: the whole elaborate machinery of contemporary postelectronic music, on the one hand, and the systems of television production, on the other, are not, for example, environments in which most people feel at home, and in any case they inspire very little optimism about that potential control or mastery over processes, oneself, and nature and collective destiny, which nonalienated labor necessarily includes and projects. Thus the older Romantic analogy tends to remain a dead letter because the very artistic production held up as a Utopian model for alternative social living is itself a closed book. … As for play, it may also no longer mean very much as a reminder and an alternative experience in a situation in which leisure is as commodified as work, free time and vacations as organized and planified as the day in the office, the object of whole new industries of mass diversion of various kinds, outfitted with their own distinct high-tech equipment and commodities and saddled with thoroughgoing and themselves fully organized processes of ideological indoctrination. Play once meant children, who were in an older society the stand-in for those more distant representatives of Nature like the savage. But where children are themselves taken in hand and organized, integrated into consumer society, childhood may have lost its capacity to suggest or project ideas like play, which were thought to convey freedom in motion, as a form of active self-invention and self-determination. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 354 (#expands, via linked claim)

It would seem essential to distinguish the emergent forms of a new commercial culture — beginning with advertisements and spreading on to formal packaging of all kinds, from products to buildings, and not excluding artistic commodities such as television shows (the “logo”) and best-sellers and films — from the older kinds of folk and genuinely “popular” culture which flourished when the older social classes of a peasantry and an urban artisanat still existed and which, from the midnineteenth century on, has gradually been colonized and extinguished by commodification and the market system. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 192 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

But images of individual figures that are not part of any narrative or moral scene may be understood in conjunction with a mainly nineteenth-century cultural movement that has been described as “the discovery of the people” and involved the “discovery” of folklore and popular culture. In this context “the people” usually meant uneducated folk and especially the peasants who were thought to have preserved primitive customs longer than anyone else. These ideas were much in common with romantic nationalism and the search by various national movements of their “authentic” ancient past. In this attempt to reconstruct the past, nationalists have often turned to folklore and folk arts that were believed to express the distinctive spirit of the nation and thus were to be revived and made a model for the future development of the nation. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 616 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Genuine folk culture was colonized and extinguished by commodification from the midnineteenth century — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 192; Traditional social structures and orders can disintegrate over time; Colonial architecture and commodities re-present a separate realm of social meaning — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 406 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Genuine folk culture was colonized and extinguished by commodification from the midnineteenth century #corroborates (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 192
• Art and play no longer model nonalienated labor under late capitalism #expands (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 354
• Nationalist movements reconstructed authentic ancient pasts through folklore and folk arts #expands (0.80) — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 616
• Local place-based relations gave pre-modern communities solidity #corroborates (0.78) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 247
• Traditional social structures and orders can disintegrate over time #expands (0.75)
• Colonial architecture and commodities re-present a separate realm of social meaning #complicates (0.72) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 406