Cultural Policy: Outsider Art

Culture and the arts attract attention, even notoriety, as subjects of public debate in the USA and internationally. The aesthetic sphere has never been immune to political, religious, or economic pressures. Government censorship of artists, boycotts of exhibitions, and death threats by religious zealots increasingly highlight the gravity and importance of the arts in the public domain. Art has become a center for public controversy, discourse, and policy. But being an aspect of the public sphere does not necessarily mean that the arts are governed entirely by governmental policies. Under certain conditions, nongovernmental structures and processes are at least as important in understanding how certain artistic genres come to be constituted. One of the outstanding cases of this phenomenon is that of ‘outsider art.’ Outsider art is a term that had been used in the past to signify the art of the ‘insane.’ More recently it has been enriched by the cultural creations of what are presented as self-taught artists: naives, visionaries, folk artists, isolates, hobbyists, the homeless, prison inmates. Their recognition as outsider artists comes not from their own career strategies, but from the practices of art dealers, galleries, art critics, scholars, mental health specialists, art museums and, only relatively recently, government agencies. From being a curiosity of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, in the course of the past few years outsider works have gained fame and monetary as well as symbolic value. Through regularized international exhibits, journals and monographs that detail their appearance and quality, a ‘tradition’ of outsider art has emerged with canonic works selling for what, compared to the past, are extraordinary prices. Converging with these marketing and psychiatric developments is a growing interest in the construction of social identity and its relationship to cultural change. Questions of ‘marginality’ and exclusion on the bases of gender, race, class, status, or socially defined handicaps have come to permeate art worlds as well. While retaining at its center features intrinsic to the arts, the autonomous nature of aesthetic creation, and the human agency of the creator, this article places outsider art within its historical, social, economic, and political context. First, analyzing the institutions of the arts in modern times, it clarifies how authoritative actors and gatekeeping institutions (Academies and Salons) created artistic status hierarchies. The primary result is the construction of the hierarchy of integrated professionals and mavericks. Mavericks were viewed—and often presented themselves—as being ‘alienated’ from the traditional or official artistic values of their time, which they considered in conflict with the quasi-sacerdotal status that they assigned to art. As a commerce in art grew, artists rejected by the official institutions found new sources of support in bourgeois patrons through the growing dealership system. For many who believe that the arts have lost their autonomy by becoming pawns in either a market system or handmaidens to established governments, outsider artists have the appeal of being completely disinterested in material concerns. Second, the article analyzes the semi-institutionalization of successive avant garde movements, and shows how it converges with the recognition of marginal art forms: of patients, children, ‘primitives.’ While viewed positively by some, these forms and their makers also endured attacks—by Nazi dogmatists who used their apparent kinship with them to justify denigrating Expressionist and other avant garde art as ‘degenerate.’ Third, noting that outsider art converges with trends in ‘insider art’ worlds, the article reveals how the margins of the artistic world have come to defy easy categorization: barriers between high and low art, art and politics, art and religious rite, art and emotional expression, and art and life itself have been repeatedly blurred and breached. When piles of bricks are displayed in museums, when music is composed for performance under water, the boundaries between genres have become so fluid that conventional understandings of art are strained. This is manifest in the difficulties that arise among art historians, aestheticians, social scientists and policy makers when they try to delineate what is art, what it should include or exclude, whether and how art should be evaluated, what importance to assign the arts, and how and whether to provide official governmental support for artistic creation. This entry concludes by discussing the possible consequences for the arts and artists, outsider and insider, of public policies.