Yesterday's visit to the art museum set me thinking. The featured exhibit was quilts from the Gee's Bend community, set alongside and accorded the same respect as works in the museum's exhibit of modern abstract art. Analysts found many similarities between the creations of an isolated, impoverished community and those of the high-brow professional artists.
Folk art, and folk music, grow out of the real lives of ordinary, untrained people. That the experts, the professionals, can find much of value and sophistication in these genres reveals a foundational truth: not that the work of untrained amateurs is as good as that of those who have studied hard and practiced long, but that there are no ordinary people. Each person, being made in the image of God, has within him both the divine creativity and the access to reality that make art important.
Hence my inspiration, and hope, that blogging—despite the often-justified critism by professional writers and journalists—may be the literary equivalent of folk art. The quilts of Gee's Bend were made to keep families warm, and only later discovered to be worthy of hanging on a museum wall.
