Folk Art, Commercial Art, and the Avantgarde: An Artistic Ternary

​Yesterday I had the pleasure of reading a great essay, and hearing a great story, from James Hart, on his Penny Wagers newsletter. Towards the end of his piece he wrote something that really struck a chord with me. He got on the subject of how we make art, what and who for and how there is “an ethos that we’ve lost in lieu of something else. For lack of better terminology, let’s call it a ‘folk’ versus ‘commercial’ approach to art and expression.”

He then went on to give some really great examples of the folk approach to art and the commercial approach, comparing and contrasting.

Here is the rough litmus test he gives to determine whether something is folk or commercial:

“Folk is mutable. Commercial is fixed... Folk is learned in the moment, from person to person. Commercial is learned asynchronously through products…Folk is participatory. Commercial is presentational…Folk serves a social function. Commercial serves consumption… Folk is process-driven. Commercial is product-driven.”

He gives examples for each part of his test, and it really is worth a close read. I wrote some comments to Hart after I read the piece and it all really got me thinking. I had already been thinking about binaries, and how to resolve them, from a short not Hart had posted. Hart had mentioned there was a lot more nuance to his schema, and that it wasn’t a simple binary.

“I should make it clear that I’m not judging commercial art. These two have helped each other throughout the past several centuries, and thank goodness for that. It’s precisely because of the recorded nature of books that many oral traditions have even survived. And I’m not going to sit here and try to convince you that I don’t like novels, movies or Pink Floyd. This isn’t some high horse thing.”

My overstimulated cogitation got going with all this, and it started with poetry, because Hart had mentioned his experience in being “frustrated with the masses for turning their backs on poetry.” As someone who writes poetry as well, I understand the frustration. Yet I think poets themselves are partly to blame. I don't think the masses have turned their backs on poetry as much as poets, at least since the twentieth century, started to turn their back on the masses. Poetry used to be much more accessible and spoke to people who could hear its beauty. I do think that with the explosion of electronic media, it was one of the major casualties of casual entertainment.

There haven’t ever been many poets on television or radio, even in the days of variety shows.

I'm not anti-modernist, or anti-postmodernist. “Pomo” is not a dirty word to me. Ever since I was a kid I started seeking out the weird, the odd, the strange… the avantgarde. I first read T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland in the sixth grade. I didn’t make much headway with it then, but I knew that I liked it, that its mystery and strangeness compelled to return to it and seek its meaning. For casual readers it remains an obscure reading, and with the continued ascent of modernism in literature, I think poetry became too academic. Lots of writers wanted to imitate Eliot, Pound and the others. Not everyone who comes to read poetry for the joy of the language, the imagery, and the emotional connection, wants to sit down with a concordance and skeleton key to make sense of it all.

Later came the Beats and think it was necessary to break open the rigidity of form, the complete abandonment of form over the rest of the century gave little for people to hold onto, except aficionados. In the aftermath of the countercultural 50s, 60s, 70s, poetry became more academic, less the province of the people. It became too hard to interpret, alongside other kinds of art, literature and whatnot... so I think many people stopped paying attention to poetry. They got their fix of it in the lyrics of Bob Dylan and other exceptional songwriters instead.

Musing along these notions was when my own experimental predilection hit me, and I realized that one way to resolve the binary between commercial art and folk art was to include the avantgarde as a third circle.
As I mentioned, I love the weird, the strange the obscure. I seek it out. I think it even seeks me out. But for people who’ve grown accustomed to commercial art, it’s fierce independence and lack of scalability can be off putting. For those with a traditionalist mindset the experimental can appear to be a pure derangement of forms that should never be messed with or adulterated. Yet it is in the crossover zones between folk and commercial art, commercial art and the avantgarde, experimental approaches and folk that very interesting hybrids occur. In the fourth locus created when all three are combined, new hybrid forms are able to be synthesized.

The rest of this mostly off-the-cuff spontaneous essay will take an unpolished look at the places where “no commercial potential” plays nice with banjo pickin’ grannies and the mainstream material made for mass consumption. I’ll be looking across mediums as well.

For one thing, a lot of art that ends up being of great cultural value is experimental in nature, and not of much use to the publishers, galleries, and record labels for whom the bottom line is their sole reason of existence. Publishing used to be different, but that’s another story. (For those interested in a time when publishers would print culturally important books that weren’t likely to sell in huge quantities, see The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read by André Schiffrin.)

Furthermore, aspects of the avantgarde often end up in the world of the highly commercial. We need to look no further than surrealism and its use in advertising and commercials. Another example of the way experimental sound production became mainstream, was in the use of noise and record sampling. Hip-hop and rap are two of the dominant genres of music around the globe, but it all started using techniques that had first been used in the musique concrète created by Pierre Schaeffer in France starting in the 1940s, manipulating records. Now the figure of the electronic music DJ is entirely mainstream as well, with none other than the current Pope having his own DJ.

In literature we might look at this triad as the storytellers of traditional tales who represent the folk tradition, the postmodern poets and stylists who represent the avantgarde, and the pulp, romance and thriller writers who represent the commercial. Writers such as Samuel R. Delany cut his teeth in the world of pulp science fiction, became enamored with postmodern theory, and applied techniques of experimental writing to the hybrid novel Dhalgren, to great success. The novel, and later film, The Warriors, was a standard kind of pulp urban adventure plot about inner city gangs. Yet it was based on the traditional story Anabasis, from the Greek, and it also achieved a successful reception, especially the film.

All of the best early fantasy writers took their inspiration directly from world mythology. At the time fantasy was still a niche area of literature. A place for nerds. As such, there was an essential experimental aspect to it, even if it wasn’t technically avantgarde. Like science fiction it has since come to dominate much of the publishing market. To its own detriment, it has become less and less experimental, less and less connected to the mythic, and now is in complete throe to the commercial, making most of it lackluster and unfulfilling.

In visual art you have your whittlers and chainsaw sculptors making folk art, Jackson Pollock doing the avantgarde, and Bob Ross and Thomas Kincaid representing the commercial. Did you know Bob Ross apprenticed under the maverick weirdo H.R. Giger? Ross had a mental breakdown after working with him He might have been in PTSD recovery mode for the remainder of his career. I think it would have been very nice to see a synthesis between their very different aesthetics. Too bad there was never a PBS show where a man with an afro instructed people how to paint highly sexualized alien lifeforms. And yet for all of Giger’s high strangeness, he went on to have as much success as Ross, though in a different manner, with the use of his art in the Alien and Species films, seeding humanities consciousness with his otherworldly imagery.

In music you have your fiddlers and banjo players playing tunes that have been passed down, while in the commercial world Taylor Swift is raking it in with her pop, and in the avantgarde, small audiences make music for equally small audiences.

So often a creator gets stuck in one of these rings without venturing into the place of overlap. Countless are the avantgarde musicians who’ve never made a song that could have a commercial success. Countless are the pop singers who would never dream of going atonal, of using field recordings, or stochastic processes to come up with musical accompaniment. Countless are the folk singers who wouldn’t go to an experimental electronic concert, or to a free jazz improvisatory throwdown. But for those who make the venture to straddle the lines between commercial, experimental, and folk, new areas of possibility began to emerge.

Music writer Kristīne Brence talks about the blending of folk and metal. “Folklore metal is important as it captures the essence and spirit of traditional folk music while infusing it with the power and intensity of heavy metal. It serves as a means of preserving and celebrating cultural heritage, as well as connecting modern audiences with the stories, myths, and traditions of past generations. This genre also allows for artistic expression and exploration of different musical influences, creating a unique and diverse sound that resonates with listeners around the world.” 

These places of blending and crossover are where some of the most interesting material is being created. Those who do the crossing over need to have a wide variety of interests and wide-anging curiosity to become successful blenders of their own in the glass bead game of artistic synthesis. They need to be happy to experience the so-called highbrow with the so-called lowbrow, to go to the symphony on a Friday night and to a bluegrass show the following weekend, and read a cheap thriller spy novel during the week. They might pick up a copy of Mad Magazine or Cracked one day, a book by Thomas Pynchon the next, and then head over to a craft festival the next night. The next week they might take their partner out to see the latest Romcom at the theater.

Works that touch on all three can end up being adventurous in their experimentalism, accessible to the commercial world of the casual reader, listener or viewer, and rooted in the timeless traditions of folk that connect it to lineages of story and skill.

Speaking of Hollywood, they seem to have lost most of their storytelling ability by barely flirting with anything that might be deemed arthouse. It has led to a cultural bankruptcy. Yet the arthouse films can be seen as too snobby when they don’t leave anything for a viewer to hold onto in terms of plot or traditional pacing. Either can feel alienating to those who wish for traditional stories and forms.

O Brother Where Art Thou? was such a hit because it combined the traditional tale of the Odyssey, with folk music in an artsy movie that hit the recognizable plot beats of a commercial flick. Blue Velvet also took the commercial aspects of the noir thriller and detective movie and blurred them in a gently surrealist lens. There was the heart of young love, and the darkness of obsession painted with abstract impressions. David Lynch’s last movie, while celebrated by critics and fans, had less appeal to the average movie goer and is not such a cultural touchstone as Blue Velvet and some of his other works have remained.

Some areas borrow from one area and not another. Classical music, while not necessarily to be categorized as avantgarde, borrows routinely from folk motifs. Popular music borrows from classical. James Joyce borrowed from the traditional tales of classical literature, again with the Odyssey, but framed it in an experimental fiction of vast cultural importance, but with little kinship to the commercial potboiler. In the fifteen years it took him to write Finnegans Wake, a pulp novelist would have cranked out fifteen books.

The folk strains in country music and jazz, coming from ancient repositories of song in Europe and Africa, gave it their power. When those folk strains got watered down into young country and smooth jazz, the material might have been useful for background music at parties and casual listening, but it failed to touch the depths of soul reached by the other forms.

The Americana and alternative country movements that broke away from country as it was going to continue rooted work along with experimentation however have continued to touch discerning listeners in a way that the light beer version of the music does not. It isn’t just soundtrack music.

The same is true of those who’ve continued to push around the exploratory boundaries of jazz while also retaining some of the swing and other elements that keep it grounded. Of course there is extreme avantgarde jazz just as much as the easy listening variety. I contend the one that takes its root, pushes with experimentation, and remains relatable produces the most memorable and touching art. Vaporwave could be considered a mixture of the experimental approach and the commercial.

​The music of Sontag Shogun on their 2025 album Päiväkahvit is an example of a work that sits in the center of the three overlapping circles, with elements of folk music, classical piano played by Ian Temple, and field recordings, post-rock guitar fizz, and modular electronic workouts gluing it all together into a new gestalt.

For those of us who wish to see our culture flourish, our works must embrace commercial potential to reach an audience, rootedness in folk traditions to touch the heart, imagination and kindle our shared long memory, and experimentation that pushes at the boundaries of the possible.

It is in that area in-between ponderous deliberation over every word and sentence, and the slapdash approach of commercial interest, while also drawing from the primordial powers of our variety folk traditions, that could infuse contemporary art of any media with a new power.

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TRINARY CODE painting by Melissa Shemanna