From The Gimp Parade, a link to an article about Outsider Art, which the article defines as follows:
The term Outsider Art, or art brut as it is sometimes known, is used to describe works by artists with no formal training operating outside the mainstream, often on the fringes of society.
As an aspiring artist, I have difficulty looking askance at any favorable attention paid to artwork, particularly the kind that might actually result in sales. The progressive in me is forced to look every gift horse in the mouth, however.
It is absolutely true that any different perspective can enrich an art form. Look at the use of aesthetic conventions and techniques from Japanese art in turn-of-the-century French painting.
But it’s also true that the artists–and they are artists–can be denigrated by the idea of outsider art and the line it creates, not merely between acquaintance with x culture’s academy traditions but with artistic intelligence and awareness. Outsider art is mere craft. Its artistic value to the art world is a happy accident. Its value derives as much from its meaning as an artifact as a creative work. It has novelty value, kitsch value. It is cute. It is grotesque. The people who create it are not operating under a conceptual framework, because they aren’t smart enough or sophisticated enough to build one.
The tone of this article is wholly respectful, but look at the assumption it points to here:
Artist William Scott sinks his hands into a mass of soft, wet clay. Using his thumbs he carefully shapes the clay into the nose of an Afro-American basketball player.
Scott recently sold out a one-man show of his striking ceramic busts at the prestigious White Columns Gallery in New York.
His work has been displayed at galleries across the United States and Europe and is sought after by art collectors worldwide.
William Scott is also severely autistic.
Why are these two conditions–autism and the ability to make beautiful realistic sculptures of human faces–mutually exclusive or even difficult to reconcile? Why would his autism make him less capable, less attentive, or less inclined to create? Why is it mundane when an amateur in a community-college sculpture class makes a bust of her daughter, but fascinating when he makes a bust of a sports star? And why is he any more of an outsider than, say, R. Crumb or Jess Collins? The stereotype of the artist as outsider, stranger, weirdo is not a new or limited one. Artists are supposed to see things a little differently or a little more deeply. That’s why their art is interesting, and why Thomas Kinkade is considered a lesser artist than Giorgio Morandi.
The article defines Outsider Art this way:
The term Outsider Art, or art brut as it is sometimes known, is used to describe works by artists with no formal training operating outside the mainstream, often on the fringes of society.
This article defines it this way:
The naive, the innocent, the self-taught,
the visionary, the intuitive, the eccentric;
The schizophrenic, the developmentally disabled,
the psychotic, the obsessive, the compulsive.
In other words, you can either create something really strange, or you can be something we consider really strange. Can you come up with an example of a brilliant artist who is not visionary? Can you name an artist who was not obsessive about some facet of their art? (Better yet: can you name an artist or three who were obsessive and yet were not labeled outsider?) Can you name an artist whose gift with images could not be called intuition?
The first subheading in the wiki article is, “Art of the Insane.” Henry Darger is listed, but not Jess Collins. Vincent Van Gogh is also absent–although, to be fair, he predated the term by some hundred years. Caravaggio doesn’t appear anywhere. Neither does Edward Munch.
It goes on:
The strong appeal of all this work seems to be rooted primarily in its otherness. It brings us the surprising, the unexpected and the fresh. Our mainstream cultural heirarchy has become so refined and self-referential that we have developed a deep-seated longing for truly fresh, honest and original creative expression.
How much value can we–the insiders whose subjectivity is the starting point, I suppose–glean from these works if we turn them into curiosities? How can we interpret them if we put them and their creators on the back end of the cultural beyond simply because their work is not what we expect from ourselves?