Today I was told that I had been “passed by” by something someone else considered of vital “you should donate money to this cause” sort of importance. I laughed to myself a bit over this because I had actually read something about this thing at the time when it first came up but it wasn’t of great significance to me so I guess I did let it pass by.
But the notion of being one who has been passed by, now that’s sort of cool isn’t it? It means I can honestly say I just might be one of those outside the mainstream. It’s all right, I know many of you have thought I’m a little weird all along. I’m good with that. I’ll be the one trying to figure it out, doing it my own way over here. Next time you look I’ll probably be still messing around with small squares of fabric and groups of seventeen syllables.
Moments after doing my little happy dance celebrating my arrival outside “the know”, I read this article in the NYTimes about the Outsider Art Fair. This is its twentieth year, according to the article. I laughed out loud over
As before, the fair suggests that the line between outsider and insider art becomes blurrier with each passing year.
The “as before” part is superfluous, don’t you think? Those outside the gates of what current culture-scribes considers “Art” consider themselves outsiders and go on creating. Then, on a quite regular basis, other people look at their stuff, find it pleasing, satisfying, desirable, stimulating or whatever, everyone has a bit of wine and it all gets huggy-kissy and someone writes an article about the big exhibit and how the lines between inside and outside gets blurrier every year.
At the same time the fair also gives glimpses of just how limitless the outsider realm remains.
—description of the works on exhibit—
This fair has rarely made a better case for itself, for the field of artistic activity whose depth it only hints at and for the increasing futility of cordoning off that field from the rest of today’s art.
In other words – those boundaries that we keep knocking our heads against… might be mostly in our heads to begin with.
