Agria 42. (Az Egri Múzeum Évkönyve - Annales Musei Agriensis, 2006)

Szilágyi Miklós: A kisipar népi iparművészetté válásának körülményei és következményei

handicraft associations, as well as the individual practitioners and organisers of art group activities, practising a form of artistic folklorism or neo-folklorism of a more recent provenance, operate at the standards demanded and according to the new demands of the market without compromising the genre. The author, an ethnographer who has several decades of experience sitting on such juries, takes the opportunity to share his personal experiences. Looking at the examples of handicrafts, not originally considered to be folk arts: (the work of blacksmiths, cutlers, coppersmiths, bootmakers, cobblers, slipper-makers, sandalmakers) over the last fifty years, he shows that the numbers of those active in making these practical, and generally speaking everyday, objects have fallen drastically, to the extent that crafts which provided many with livelihoods in the smaller country towns 60-80 years ago, have all but died out. In becoming "endangered species" the rare survivors practising their crafts in the traditional manner began to be treated like folk artists. Rather than being a recognition by a discerning public of the achievements of a professional elite, this new perception reflected an acknowledgement that the crafts in question displayed an artistic quality. It should therefore be the job of the professional panels, and their resident ethnographers, folklorists and craftsmen, to make sure that these craftsmen, now that they have been imdued with an artistic sensibility by the general public, practise their craft in an honest manner, something that should also apply to those self-taught craftsmen who are doing it out of some feeling of nostalgia for the handicrafts. 274