I hear and read the terms Outsider Art and Mainstream Art all the time. Generally Outsider Art seems to mean art that is being created and sold by artists who do not have college degrees and have not formally studied the rules & techniques generally accepted “today” as the “right” way to create sellable art, or they are not one of the Old Masters (that would be impossible to do though since all the Old Masters are dead!)
Sellable art is hard to quantify though … I went to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts yesterday … one of the abstract paintings hanging on the wall was a canvas with a square (lines – not filled in) painted on it in black paint. I didn’t write down the artist name … anyone of the millions of people on earth could do the exact same thing and make the exact same statement … oh … the placement might be different and the size of the canvas could be different … but it would boil down to a square in black lines on a white canvas – I can create that in MS Word using the drawing toolbar even! But someone somewhere at some-when decided that was Mainstream Art great enough for a Museum display.
I sell my art … I do not have a college degree in painting but I have formally studied with several artists over the years about brush and paint techniques, perspective and a million other things that artists want to know about from other artists … including the business side of art.
Cavemen and cavewomen created art for the same reasons I do today … to decorate thier home, to share what they saw or felt with others and to try to make sense of their world.
Most art is utilized as Decorative Art yet there is an off-shoot art category – decorative art too. All art is decorative … it is the nature of art to be decorative – the decor may not be what I would want to live with on a daily basis but someone somewhere some-when does.
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Technorati Tags: Art, Outsider Art, Mainstream Art, Decorative Art