Outsider Art, In or Outside the World of Art?

Outsider art has been receiving increasing attention and appreciation within the art world, as the successful annual Outsider Art Fairs in Paris and New York and, closer to home, the recent opening the Outsider Art Museum in Heritage Amsterdam show and The Museum of Everything exhibition in Kunsthal Rotterdam indicate. Nevertheless, this art form is usually defined as the art made by artists outside the mainstream art world that could be self-taught, psychiatric patients or other persons who don’t form part of the leading art historical discourse. In this study, I research how curators, museum directors, gallery owners and museum visitors deal with this apparent paradox of the contemporary position of outsider art: needing to be “out”’ to be “in”. Can outsider artists who enter the museum walls and the market place still be called outsider? And how and why would certain of the actors of the art field do this? Departing from the sociological and aesthetic paradoxical position and nature of this art, this thesis uses the data obtained in semi-structured interview sessions with the aforementioned art professionals from Belgium and the Netherlands. By considering the different framing strategies they use, I argue that their framing strategies are manifold and often used in contradictory ways by one and the same person according to the outcomes aimed at. Most of the respondents are reluctant to pin down the borders of outsider art within their practice, as they do with art brut for instance. Two prevailing framings are (1) the focus on the aesthetic and artistic qualities of outsider art, at the expense of its social dimension and (2) the relationship with contemporary art, copying the presentation models for instance. By doing this, respondents give legitimacy to outsider art as a contemporary art form, cutting it loose from its past as a functional or medical past. Nonetheless, I argue that the findings point out that although respondents advocate inclusion and integration of outsider art in the contemporary art world based on the similarities, on other occasions they still bring forward its apparent otherness, in order to assure the position of outsider art in-between both art worlds. The findings of this research add to the ongoing debate on outsider art, but also place it in the broader framework of art forms striving for legitimization and show how elementary questions about the nature of art are very present in the framing of outsider art by field professionals whose institutions, for the greater part, also aim at posing questions instead of giving clear answers.