I agree, but in terms of process you could say that about any creative tradition - everything from car design to computer technology. This is where the whole idea of Folk fails for me - it becomes too precious a contrivance that assumes that those creative processes are any different from any other. Individual Creativity is therefore negated by seeing things in terms of their Collective Anonymous Consequence - like Traditional Folk Song (which is as much a creative idiom as any other sort of music). We see Folk Art in patronising terms of Naivity and Primitivism; we see them as being Noble, Natural, Innocent, Uneducated, Untainted. The Folk / Volk myth springs from a political need to negate the individual. Left or Right, it makes little difference - the Folk are entirely passive to their Folk status and their Uneducated Innocence stands in stark contrast to the scholarship deemed necessary to understand them, or the taxonomy of their works.

Folk Art tends to the anonymous and the collective; Outsider Art to the eccentric, idiosyncratic and the maladjusted. Both embody a strong sense of Tradition, Idenity and overall Aesthetic which might be seen in terms of our deeper psycho-biological subroutines which determine such things in the first place. To what extent is anyone truly an Outsider? Or even an Individual? It's a dialogue, ongoing, between our unique selves and the culture into which we have been born.

Having said that, my culture is my unique perception of experience thus far in my life; any objectivity is the consequence of the billions of other human individuals with whom I just happen to share this planet with, each of whom see it very much their own way. It's all a matter of unique perception, and it ends when we die.