See below: An important (though not Kentucky-focussed) discussion of the economic evolution or devolution of traditional crafts is found in a recent article in the Australian crafts magazine Garland.  The article, by Liliana Morais, notes the the decline of mingei (Japanese "folk art" / "people's crafts") and postulates a predictable series of developments that arise from "the encounter between rich and poor, center and periphery, in the past...."

Liliana Morais on Craft Evolution and Authenticity

1. A craft object is made in a traditional community for everyday use of the people that make it or is exchanged for other necessities, using local materials and inherited techniques. Objects are strongly related to and derived from people’s needs, lifestyle, taste, and views of the world.

2. An intellectual, critic, or collector discovers the community, drawing attention to the objects produced there through writings, exhibitions, and so forth.

3. As people from outside the community buy the object without direct knowledge of its producers or conditions of production, the object enters the market, thus becoming a commodity in the Marxist sense.

4. Makers start needing to produce more to answer growing demand. They may introduce advanced technology to produce objects cheaper and more efficiently. Producing more means larger quantities of raw materials are needed, which may lead to the depletion of natural resources. When that happens, raw materials start to be collected elsewhere, or cheaper artificial alternatives are introduced.

5. Promotion of the craft object outside the region might lead to the popularization of the community that produces it, drawing tourists to the area, which can have serious environmental and social impacts, if in mass quantities and unregulated.

6. As money enters the community in unprecedented quantities, people’s lifestyles are permanently altered. Makers, who once had made a variety of objects as a complement to other activities, start dedicating themselves to only one type of craft production full-time. With some makers getting more attention and selling more than others, inequalities with the community widen.

7. The changing lifestyles and development of a money-centered economy leads to members of the community becoming consumers themselves. They can now buy cheap industrial products while making craft objects to sell to tourists and collectors, who are willing to pay higher prices for them. The objects no longer fill a function in the community that produces them. Separated from their original context and meaning, objects might lose their aura of “authenticity”, thus becoming “tourist art” (see Clifford, 1998).

8. Cheaper copies of the object are produced, attracting uneducated consumers. Materials, process, and labor involved in the making become irrelevant, leading to what Marx calls commodity fetishism (consumers don’t know who, where, and how the object is made; they fetishize the final product).

9. With rapid changing market trends and economic recessions, demand for the object wanes.

10. Some collectors may still buy the perceived “authentic” object to sell to the wealthy or exhibit at galleries and museums elsewhere as a token of a nostalgic countryside, exotic culture, or romanticized past. The local government puts into place policies to guarantee that the techniques and skills used in the making of the object are passed down to future generations, sometimes leading them to become performative. The result is often the production of a simulacrum of a perceived “authentic” object. The making process and appearance of the object might be anachronistically and artificially stuck in the past to maintain its aura of authenticity, rather than evolving organically with people’s lives. 

• Morais, Liliana. "Let’s go back to the campfire: The lesson of mingei." Garland Magazine, Issue 25. (December 2021)

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