Art v. Creativity - Jeremey Deller on the case

Jeremy Deller's Folk Art exhibition at the Barbican does it for me.

Jeremy and Alan Kane have spent years collating this vast collection of contemporary British Folk Art. The kind of stuff that everyone makes in everyday culture. On display you will find images of Norfolk wrestlers dressed in costumes decorated with flowers by their wives, video of the 14 July Tableau staged outside Maison Berteaux, airbrush work on vans, prison tattoos, a motorbike helmut as a skull. The collection fills the Barbican's Curve space starting with A scarecrow of Michael Jackson and ending with a very large plastic Elephant.

Here then is a critically engaged work of contemporary art, doing what contemporary art does at its best - force us to take a fresh look at the world around us, reconsider our relationship to it and the ideas that sustain us.

Folk Art at the Barbican