Martin Myrone: British Folk Art – A necessary fiction?

In summer 2014 Tate Britain held the first major loan exhibition at a UK national museum dedicated to 'folk art'. In this talk the exhibition's co-curator will review the curatorial and artistic decisions involved in putting this show together, and consider the longer and wider history of 'folk art' as a fraught and neglected concept in British cultural life. Often considered as marginal, irrelevant, politically contentious or an historical fiction, 'folk art' has been given new life over the last twenty years, and the Tate exhibition will be seen in light of recent art practice as well as art-historical and anthropological debates.