Rugs, Guitars, and Fiddling

What do exotic Mexican area rugs, handcrafted steel-string guitars, and American fiddling have in common today? Many contemporary tradition bearers embrace complexity in form and content. They construct objects and performances that draw on the past and evoke nostalgia effectively but also reward close attention. In Rugs, Guitars, and Fiddling: Intensification and the Rich Modern Lives of Traditional Arts , the author argues that this entails three types of change that gather under an umbrella term: intensification. First, traditional creativity can be intensified through virtuosity—doing hard things fluently. Second, intensification can be through addition, through packing lots of traditional content into conventionally sized packages. Third, in intensification through selection, artistic impact can grow even if amount of information recedes by emphasizing compelling ideas—e. g., crafting a threatening red and black viper rather than a pretty duck decoy featuring more colors and contours. Rugs handwoven in southern Mexico, luthier-made guitars, and southern US fiddle styles experience parallel changes, absorbing just enough of the flavors, dynamics, and rhythms of modern life to reshape inherited folklore for wide celebration today. New mosaics of details and skeins of nuances don’t transform craft into esoteric fine art, but rather enlist the twists and turns and endless variety of the contemporary world therapeutically, helping transform our daily chaos into parades of negotiable jigsaw puzzles. Intensification helps make crafts and traditional performances more accessible and understandable and thus more effective, bringing past and present closer together, helping folk arts continue to perform their magic today.