What in the World is the “outsider aesthetic”? (2026)

I’ve been researching the history of outsider art in a more in-depth way since I’ve been living in the South. There’s also been a recent trend in the plastic arts towards referencing outsider art in the art world magazines that I buy and the museums that I visit. Outsider art was already a trend in the subculture of noise music led in part by the accompanying visual universe of New Weird America starting in the early aughts. Then, as now, the outsider was seen as inhabiting a certain authenticity as such he-usually the outsider was a male-had remained uncorrupted by the academic universe and the arc of art history. Noise subculture always had an anti-intellectual and anti-college bent starting in the early aughts. (Now it has been taken in by institutions such that noise practitioners admit that they have gone to college on CVs.) That anti-intellectualism was also seen as authentic and the outsider, as he or she has traditionally been shut out of academia involuntarily, has been seen in subculture as an anti-intellectual rebel who produces underground art without university accolades or concerns for self-censorship.

“And what is an authentic lunatic? He is a man who has preferred to become what is socially understood as mad rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. In its asylums, society has managed to strangle all those it has wished to rid itself of or to defend itself from, because they refused to make themselves accomplices to various flagrant dishonesties. For a lunatic is also a man whom society has not wished to listen to, and whom it is determined to prevent from uttering unbearable truths.”-Antonin Artaud from “Van Gogh, the Suicide Provoked by Society”, 1947

Artaud, a frequent victim of poor asylum treatment and entrapment himself, wrote about the authenticity and rebelliousness of the lunatic during the inception of surrealism which coincided with the inception of art brut. (Artuad’s psychiatrist Dr. Ferdiere, who administered no less than 58 electroshock treatments to Artaud during its most dangerous iteration, was a collector and curator of surrealist and mental patient art. Among his patients was also surrealist Unica Zurn who created automatic drawings under his guidance and encouragement.)

“Art brut”, which translates to “raw art”, was a term invented by the painter Jean Dubuffet to describe “authentic” works of art made by isolated individuals. In his art brut manifesto Jean Dubuffet conflates the efforts of indigenous tribes with the works of those isolated in mental asylums and self-taught farmers in the European countryside. All of this work was said to be more authentic due to the isolation that the artists were working in. Isolation from the art world and the culture at large was very important to Dubuffet’s vision of authenticity. I wonder if the work produced under Dr. Ferdiere’s guidance was even really made in isolation from the art world due to his interest in surrealism.

Sometimes the underground in the aughts took on a certain aesthetic associated with art brut. This could be because those individuals who worked in isolation aligned themselves with the isolation of the oppressed peoples whose work has, unfortunately, been place under the outsider umbrella.

In America “art brut” is known as “outsider art.” The origins of the genre “outsider art” were, therefore, already problematic starting from their inception in Dubuffet’s manifesto. Now critics like Jerry Saltz have pushed to do away with the designation “outsider art”, which segregates the artists working under this umbrella from being seen as real artists indefinitely. However, some people still see outsider art as a celebration of innocence and authenticity and so they see nothing wrong with it. In the South the work of self-taught artists working in rural areas has been celebrated as “outsider art” for as long as I can remember. I’ve always wondered why outsider art seems to have a certain aesthetic. Wouldn’t people with such diverse backgrounds and cultures each have their own story to tell? How could there be a unified aesthetic of illness? What does illness have to do with an entire culture itself? Now that I’ve researched outsider art’s history more, a history that we don’t traditionally learn about in art school, I know that this is an aesthetic that definitely has its roots in surrealism. In that sense surrealist influences are built into the Southern art aesthetic now. There isn’t a lot of writing on the Southern contemporary art aesthetic, but I’ve noticed that one definitely exists and its goals are reflected in who gets acknowledged by local museums and granting authorities. In avant-garde music in the South there is definitely an influence of surrealistic automatism on the musical compositions of many of the players.

I really don’t want to be seen as an outsider artist. I find its origins to be so problematic that I no longer want to have anything to do with this look in my own work. I really don’t know how someone like Artaud or Van Gogh has shed the outsider label despite their conditions. Perhaps, for Van Gogh his works were so informed by academic traditions and Impressionist trends that they don’t seem to have been made in total isolation and for Artaud perhaps the clarity of writings situate him in public life. His plays certainly would do that.