For Folk's Sake: Art and Economy in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia by Erin Morton (review)

Erin Morton's new book is a clearly argued and well-written addition to the small body of critical literature dealing with the history of twentiethcentury craft and folk art in the Maritimes, especially in the context of Nova Scotia (see, in particular, Ian McKay's path-breaking 1994 book The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia). Morton's particular focus is on Nova Scotia's relationship with folk art as it emerged in the last third of the twentieth century. She divides her book into two major sub-sections. The first part deals with art institutions and the institutionalization of folk art, especially the creation of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the rise to artistic prominence of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. The second part switches lenses to examine the case study of folk painter Maud Lewis, examining the folk artist's rise to popular prominence within Nova Scotia against the backdrop of tourism, neoliberal copyright, and the clash between community and corporate models over the framing of folk art within Nova Scotia over the last third of the twentieth century. The author's analysis revolves around the deployment of several key terms: historical presentism, late capitalism, and neo-liberalism, which helps give the reader a sense of how the emergence and promotion of Nova Scotian folk culture is mediated by the complex relays of global capitalism, with a good emphasis on the intricacies of local history, trying to avoid a too easy homology between folk art and its political and social context. The author argues "that in Canada, as elsewhere in North America, folk art developed in a museum setting through a class of collectors and curators who sought it out according to a particular aesthetic language that was both connected to and distinct from various forms of modernism."

Morton's dedication to this topic speaks to an insider's knowledge of the folk art of the province as the author herself grew up in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, in the late 1980s. This lends itself to a very well-researched and insightful analysis of the complex interplay between art and society during a period of time when Nova Scotia and Canada as a whole were subjected to the emergence of late capitalism and the rise of neo-liberalism and globalization. It is during this period of time that postmodernism arose to challenge the universalizing pretensions of the nation-state under modernity, generating a wave of regionalist critiques of the over-centralization of culture as well as more traditional art hierarchies. Morton's mapping of these strategic fault lines in the relationship of Nova Scotia history, and of folk art, in particular, is a very important contribution to the overall understanding of the rise of critical regionalism within Canada as an important response to the corrosive effects of late capitalism.

However, this highlights one of my major criticisms of the book (ironically exacerbated by the wealth of detail and information provided by Morton), which is the continual application of the term "late capitalism" to function as a shorthand for the mediated relationship between folk art and capitalism at the end of the twentieth century. The sharpness of her insights on Nova Scotia during this period is paralleled by an equally dull use of terms like "late capitalism" (which signals her interest in the work of Marxist economist Ernest Mandel's book, Late Capitalism, in which Mandel argues for the existence of three periods within capitalism's historical development with the third – "late capitalism" – helping to explain the decades of unparalleled growth in the aftermath of World War II). If the relationship of folk art to late capitalism is to be fully analysed, the insights provided by Morton on folk art need to be much more extensively mediated and analysed. Simply invoking the term multiple times on a page does not actually...