I wrote my first book when I was 21. There are probably 100 copies still in existence; please don’t try to find one. It was self-published by a print-on-demand service, back when those were becoming a thing, and I printed it as a “reward” for people who donated to a Kickstarter project, back when Kickstarter was still in Beta. The fundraiser was for a project that the book was about: a month-long roadtrip that might be the most Bard College thing you’ve ever heard about. On our Kickstarter page and blog, my two friends and I called our roadtrip-research-art-project Insiders Out: Exploring Outsider Art in America.
As promised, I went to the amazing Outsider Art Fair in Manhattan last weekend, and while I was starting to write about what is going on with outsider art today, I remembered that I had spent thousands of words trying to answer that question fifteen years ago. I dug out a PDF of my lil book from 2010 and was alarmed to find myself interested in… my younger self?? (Is this how people start writing memoirs?) The book is a time capsule, both because I was a baby then and because there have been huge transformations in the world of outsider art in the intervening years—BUT everything comes back around, and I found a lot of my interviews and notes from 2010 to be weirdly relevant today.
OK SO HOW IS IT RELEVANT
The Contemporary Art economy is propped up by toothpicks and superglue, and it continues to rely on new kinds of things that are not Contemporary Art to keep it together. You need to have an outside to have an inside, and the inside is always leeching off the outside to keep itself animated (and sellable). Of course, there are several insides—there are multiple overlapping art worlds, which collide and reinforce and undermine each other in different ways. That makes the definition of the Outside ever shakier—and actually, even more important.
There’s a lot being said about how contemporary art is extra boring right now (one theory is that artists are pandering to the woke-police in their heads; another seemingly more obvious one is, uh, wealth stratification), and yeah, if boring art is the only kind of art you make or look at, that means the Elite Capture of your politics and selfhood was successful and your attention was distracted (mine sure was), and now you should go look at something else instead. If one art world is boring, you can find another one. Outsiders are constantly getting edged out—so you can go to the edges and redefine them as centers. The problem is that elites tend to find ways to capture the non-boring art at the edges too—and to capture the margins for profit, without materially changing the reality of marginalization. Christina Catherine Martinez wrote in a great recent post: “some people really are drinking the kool-aid, believing that art institutions can spoon a glob of justice into the bowls of the marginalized. Some just want to maneuver whatever tide keeps them in travertine bathrooms, bent over the powdered ends of keys.”
Although by now I have seen many art worlds, I have also been to many Art Basels and I don’t underestimate the power of the monolith. Revisiting the designated insider/outsider thing shows what’s at stake when identity gets coopted for profit, which is that material conditions get erased and people revert to some idea about primitivity/purity, and then start to believe in the existence of some kind of primitive-within-the-sophisticate. Dispossession is the job and the aim of the monolith. I think it makes sense to start from that premise when assessing the state of the art, inside or outside, boring or not.1
Enough! Blogs do not need to be Timely and Urgent. Here is the story of my road trip, a historical discursus on Outsider Art, and a review of the Outsider Art Fair, which, in all its problematic glory, rules.
ART MAJOR
During senior year, two friends and I were trying to decide where to move after graduation, and it wasn’t going to be New York. I didn’t remember this animating anecdote until re-reading said self-published book, but apparently NYer writer Andrea K. Scott (hi!) had come to visit our graduating studio class and someone had asked her whether you needed to move to NYC to be an artist. She replied (per my diary) that if being an artist is what you definitely wanted, then yes, you might want to move to New York for a while. (Someone else asked her if it was a bad idea to sell your paintings at a cafe… I hate to think of how I’d answer a student who asked me that today.)
