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During the last decade, scholars, art collectors, and the general public have become increasingly fascinated with "outsider artists," generally understood to refer to people with no formal artistic training, who are isolated from dominant culture and the mainstream art world, and who create art that is idiosyncratic or without precedent (Hall and Metcalf 1994:xii-xiv; Cardinal 1972; Thévoz 1976; Rhodes 2000:7-22; Russell 2001:17-20). Such art tends not to be based on community traditions and collective aesthetics, like folk art, but instead gives tangible form to a uniquely personal vision that often preoccupies the individual.1 Most literature about outsider artists views them as self-taught individuals who often begin creating things without regard to mainstream recognition or the marketplace. Even though many of these individuals may not consider themselves artists, their work now may sell for tens of thousands, or sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars, as a growing industry of outsider art galleries, publications, museum exhibits, art fairs, and auctions increasingly promote this type of art (see Seilen 2000; Fine 2004).
The term outsider art was coined by Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an equivalent for the French term art brut, proposed by the modernist painter Jean Dubuffet in 1949. For Dubuffet, art brut ("raw art"), was made by people free of artistic training who were "untouched" by culture, and existed outside of or against cultural norms, thus serving as a critique of the pretentious and artificial nature of contemporary art (Dubuffet 1988). Although Dubuffet later modified his views somewhat, and while the term outsider art has been the subject of debate, the idea of "raw art," disconnected from society and cultural influences remains pervasive today in popular and scholarly publications.2
Many of the assumptions underlying the study and collection of outsider art are deeply problematic from the perspective of folklore studies. As various scholars have noted, the concept of outsider art, somehow produced completely free from societal influences, is inaccurate, elitist, and dehumanizing, emphasizing stereotypical notions of the insane or primitive "artist as Other," as pathological in relation to "normal" people and culture (Cubbs 1994; Metcalf 1994; Jones 1994:313-318; Russell 2001:17-23; Fine 2004:26-33). Furthermore, studies of outsider artists frequently focus on the formal qualities of their art, with surprisingly little attention given to the personal motivations...