Outsider Art: The Art Market's 'Cultural Capitalism' Moment.

Outsider Art: The Art Market's 'Cultural Capitalism' Moment.

[img]http://www.furtherfield.org/sites/furtherfield.org/files/imagecache/content_width_598px/marcel-storr.jpg[/img]

New article on Furtherfield by Robert Jackson
http://www.furtherfield.org/features/articles/outsider-art-art-markets-cultural-capitalism-moment

We all know what Outsider Art is, and the fallaciousness of the term - yet, why is the mainstream art world suddenly turning towards it?

"The 55th Venice Biennale has arrived, and with it brings a new state of trends which are pontificated around, with a chuckle, a sense of forced opportunity and the shrugged sigh of 'well, everyone's doing this now apparently.' Outsider artworks (echoing Dubuffet) are aesthetically valuable, precisely insofar as they haven't been created for the sole purpose of critique, nor for being deliberately market-friendly (the last point is quite contentious). They are what they are. Or at least, 'what they are' is grouped around a deviation from the mainstream 'norm'."

Robert Jackson, is currently studying an MPhil/PhD at Lancaster University. His thesis focuses on Algorithmic Artworks, Art Formalism and Speculative Realist Ontologies, looking at digital artworks which operate as configurable units rather than networked systems, and attain independent autonomy themselves which are capable of aesthetics, rather than any supposed primary function as communicative, rational tools. The working title is Algorithm, Contingency and The Non-Human: The Aesthetics of Undecidability in Computational Art.