Page 265 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

240 Editors

A major challenge creative artists are faced with is to infuse
progressive content into communicative art forms. The characters found
in these forms represent certain collective values that may be selected
and worked out in order to reflect contemporary issues. However,
whenever this reconstruction and reappropriation is undertaken by
an educated elite—such as the graduates of folklore departments in
universities—it often takes a narrow perspective because of insufficient
insights into the cultural, economic, social and political situation of
the folk artists and their folk forms. This is detrimental to the issues
at stake because of the political influence this educated elite exerts
on media facilitators, and state and central government. As a result,
funds and attention are diverted from real artists to the researchers
and influential people. Folk artists eventually become bonded labour
at the disposal of agents who decide their programmes and give them a
small share of the money they would have received (for these specific
programmes) from public and private sponsors.
Folk artists are faced with the same kind of ostracism when trying
to deal with TV and radio: access to the mass media is restricted to
formally educated persons speaking and acting in the name of the
‘people’. The situation is similar with their partners in NGOs who may
learn a few basics of the art form and then take the right to perform it
in place of their informants.
The author comes up with an optimistic statement that this cultural
co-optation and exploitation of folk artists will not prevent rural folk
from existing. ‘If rural people are healthy, only then will the folk forms
be healthy.’ He concludes saying that that the efforts of individuals
and institutions should converge on raising literacy standards and
economical status of genuine folk artists, instead of binding them to
an exploitative system.

Scenarios of Appropriation

In reaction to a sterile and monolithic vision of Western contemporary
art forms as the unique path to creativity, a few artists have advocated
a new quest for ‘diversity’ in the performing arts by promoting inter-
cultural processes that would not be based on the exploitation of
‘subaltern’ cultural products and performers: