Outsider Art
“Outsider Art” is a distinct and important category of art that has been widely debated based on title and content make-up for years and has even emerged as a successful art marketing category with festivals such as the Outsider Art Festival held annually in Brooklyn and another festival called OUTsider, which is held in Austin, Texas. Both take place between January and February, which just passed recently.
The term outsider art derives from art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as a synonym for art brut, meaning raw art or tough art. The term art brut was coined by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe self-taught artists who were isolated in a society that rejected many of their qualities as being acceptable or normal. Much of the first outsider art was collected by Hanz Prinzhorn in a book called, “The Artistry of the Mentally Ill”, which contained over 500 painting and drawings and was the inspiration for many artists such as Picasso.
This category is wide, and expansive, carrying many different art forms and subgenres including primitive art, folk art, visionary art, etc. This is because the term “outsider” is hotly debated. What makes someone an insider verses an outsider has a lot to do with a person’ s bibliography; where they come from geographically, their level of education, their mental stability and their access to outside influence. For many collectors, the stranger the person, the more they like it. However, this creates a problem in many ways for the artists themselves. Some outsider artists don’t know that they are even making any art at all and others may be exploited in various ways by the collectors themselves.
Artists like Howard Finster, Judith Scott, Henry Darger and Royal Robertson, are some of the more famous artists.
