Art: There's nowt as queer...

I do try to be broad-minded, but if you take the whole spectrum of visual creativity in the UK today, only a very narrow band of it is likely to be noticed on these arts pages. We're always saying how much visual art has expanded, how all barriers and categories have broken down, how art can be anything. Indeed. Yet the converse isn't true. Not anything can be art " far from it. Not anyone can be recognised as an artist. The professional distinction between art and non-art is as firm as it ever was, probably firmer, and, generally, I respect it.

I write about things that appear in art galleries, and other bona fide art contexts. I do not write about crop circles. I do not write about the kind of sculptures that people make from junk and put in their front gardens. I do not write about painted eggs, decorated cakes, floral arrangements, sandcastles, snowmen, guys, scarecrows, fairground signs, trade-union banners, demonstrators' placards, houses covered in Christmas decorations, shop displays, roadside memorials to car victims, carnival floats, community murals, drawings on the backs of dirty vans, graffiti, tattoos, ornamented crash helmets, home-made shrines to Elvis and Di, topiary, bottle- top mosaics, or lost-cat notices pinned to trees. I do not write about these things, however well they are done. But now, for one week only, I will.

Folk Archive: Contemporary Popular Art from the UK is an assembly of objects, photos and videos. It includes examples of most of the above, and a good deal more. It has been put together by two artists " Jeremy Deller (who won the 2004 Turner Prize) and Alan Kane. Over the past seven years, they've been out and about, noticing, gathering, shooting. A large part of the collection has just gone on show at the Barbican, and throughout this year and next it will tour, to Milton Keynes, Exeter, Walsall, Aberystwyth and Salford. At the moment, it is the most interesting exhibition in London.

What is interesting is both the works themselves and what they stand for. Obviously, Deller and Kane have expanded on what's normally meant by 'folk art' " naive pictures of prize bulls, boxers, cockfights and schooners with all their rigging, toby jugs, quaintly fashioned wooden soldiers, hobby horses and tools. They're making the category as broad and as modern as possible. They include technological stuff " customised cars and stacks of speakers. They include things that could seem too twee or too mad. It's good to see figures from the vegetable-animals competition at the Lambeth Country Fair, and a house in Cardiff whose windows are entirely plastered with messages denouncing the local council.

They also have films of events and activities, both traditional and recent: mumming plays, miners' galas, Stop the War marches and other public protests, morris men, gurning competitions, fire festivals and a high-speed charade of the French Revolution performed annually outside a French caf in Soho.

The standard of workmanship is very variable. There's a beautiful floral tribute in the form of a large cigarette, made for the funeral of a committed smoker who died at 105; and a crash helmet very finely painted into a skull; and the crop circles are exquisite. Other things are notably ramshackle and cack-handed. But almost everything in the archive, down to a set of fingernail extensions, was consciously made for some kind of public display. Art in that sense.

Deller and Kane say, 'We are treading a path between being artists and being anthropologists', but I'm not sure that it makes much difference that they're artists themselves. The project certainly fits with the rest of Deller's work, his various explorations of vernacular culture, putting together brass bands and acid house, or the miners' strike and Civil War battle re- enactments. (I don't know anything about Kane.) But the Folk Archive seems pretty straightforward anthropology to me. Perhaps non- artists wouldn't have had such a keen eye for where visual creativity is to be found, and would have imposed stricter definitions.

Definitions, though, are unavoidably the business. Each item you come across in the Folk Archive makes you ask what actually makes it 'folk art', and what that term is supposed to mean. Evidently, it excludes fine art or gallery art, and anything that comes from the kind of project that has an artist in charge " public art, community art. It also excludes all manifestations of the mass media and the entertainment industry, all commercially available and standardised products (unless these things have been somehow customised or personalised). It chooses work that is handmade, home-made, improvised, spontaneous.

But if this Folk Archive were just an I-Spy collection of amateur making, it wouldn't hold our attention as it does. There's something more behind it: a myth, a dream of a culture that is neither high culture nor commercial pop culture, that is the authentic voice of the authentic people, an unstoppable counter- current, unofficial, resisting, subversive.