intakes

There is a term for people who make ‘art’ regardless/despite/because of what is going on in their lives and which labels them outsiders or naive. They may have an agenda, they may be mad, but the frame for calling them names is based on the art market terminology that real artists work in or aspire to be involved in. 

When curators get involved these people are shown with some regard to their humanity, but the hook is their supposed difference to well-known figures. “But look! It is amazing!”

“Amazing.”

They can then be presented as bucolic figures found on some expedition into unknown pastoral regions, or high mountains of holiness, who show a wisdom beyond their experience, and insight beyond our expectations.

Even the fact that it is called art is a give away about the social framing of the activities presented.

"Outsider art” is now well-ensconced as a genre/market segment. Apparently you can do courses on making it, not just careering it as a curator or mere collector stuffing around with it on shelves and such.

While at this point we can gesture at those who say everyone is an artist, and quote Joseph Beuys , this just reaffirms what is really the case. Arting is a subsets of worlding

In 1973, Beuys explained the thinking behind his most famous phrase, ‘Every man is an artist’: ‘Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART. This most modern art discipline – Social Sculpture/Social Architecture – will only reach fruition when every living person becomes a creator, a sculptor, or architect of the social organism.’
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/beuys-joseph-beuys-every-man-is-an-artist-ar00704

And no ‘anti-art’ makes no difference. It just gets re-branded as a brand-able commodity. The joke’s on us. Arting 'anti-art' is still worlding.

It would be better if we realise what it is we do when we live and breathe, and call that worlding, building our world while together and realise we have always been  ‘architects of the social organism’ even if we world-build with that in mind as some sort of salvation or segmentation of social efforts/organisms/conspiracies/structures/meals/masses/… .

And not calling it ‘art’ (or ‘religion’) (or marketing) except in some kind of carefully worded review of some periods of our history. The word art cuts off our hands, stabs our eyes, numbs the senses. It traduces the world.

There is no escape from the world we world.

by takes

I was once told in a house in Landsdowne Crescent, West Hobart, not Bath, that there are three stages in life: optimism, pessimism and real estate.

I was about 21. I think the comment shifted me into the second stage.

Optimism is, of course, childhood, was that stage at which Picasso said we were all artists, and wondered how to keep that perspective when we grow up.

Teenagers, sheesh.

Well, my real estate stage is that we world.

The notion or class of the outsider artist shows this is always kept, but can become dissociated by life and its enemies.

Arting is a subset of worlding.

On a related issue, here is something I wrote a decade ago: The Unmaking of Conceptual Art, a piece is from my pessimistic stage.

return takes

I’m told there is a deep, cross-culture-war love in the United State of America of outsider art. Some sort of cross-over moment that could should a way out of the echo chambered mirror maze that turns everyone into a crisis actor.

If so, it could provide a way for us to talk about building the world together instead of having conspiracy feelings and/or rage against the structure of our own inadequate agencies.

I hope my ‘outsider’ moral philosophy can help.

First version of this, from February 2024, is up on substack.com