"Can we attribute that to the Judeo/Christian Puritan morality that this country was founded on? I dunno, probably." How to explain the enormous popularity of porn in places like Japan, then? "The purpose of art is to get your message across" I couldn't disagree more. Archibald MacLeish said, "poems don't mean, they be." Transparency of meaning is no prerequisite for the making of art. Most of the artists I know couldn't tell you what their work means if you held a gun to their heads. "Vicky in a Temple is the new folk art. So what. I'm sick of snobs." I was wondering how long that one would sit there before someone got offended. Folk art is not a pejorative term--nothing wrong with folk art, or the makers of folk art. Is it snobbery to suggest that there's a distinction between folk, popular and (for lack of a better term) high art? I have some training in both--two years of graduate work in one of the country's leading folklore programs, a father who was a Yale-trained ab-ex painter, graduate degree in creative writing, and a lifetime of interaction with artists and writers. It's not a spectrum/continuum--I'm not saying folk art is "bad" and high art is "good." The two are almost completely different things, made, as we see here, for almost completely different reasons. I'm not making a value judgment, just an observation.