David Correll Studio, Brooklyn, NY

The New York Times released a story today about the current shows at Deitch Gallery, one featuring veteran Barry McGee and the other Swoon. I was at work when I saw it, and didn’t have much time to read it, but passed it on to my friend, Swoon fan Clint Fisher. He responded a while later by directing me to his response to it. It was at that point that I finally started to think about what I read, and about his response.

Like Clint, I too have always hated the term “outsider art.” I’ve always felt that it was kind of a back-handed compliment from the art establishment to artists that, as Clint says in his post, they have tried to assimilate, but have failed. In general, I think this would result in them refusing to acknowledge the work as art. But in some cases — Swoon, Barry McGee, Kaws and Raymond Pettibon all come to mind — the art is too good to deny, so the establishment has no choice but to call it art. Forced with having to show respect for it, but angered with their inability to assimilate a true individual, they accept it, but back-hand it with the label “outsider.”

A flipside to this, and another way that I think the term is used, is in the fight to find the “next big thing.” A dealer will find an artist that doesn’t fit the norms, and hasn’t been assimilated, but may be well established and respected in their own scene (as Swoon and McGee in the graf scene, and Pettibon in the punk/hardcore scene). The art establishment can’t let something good go by without claiming to have discovered it (ditto that for the music industry), so they have invented the term “outsider art” as a lable for something that they do not own, and cannot otherwise label.

The art industry, as well as society as a whole, hates things that cannot be labeled, and they will go out of their way to either find a way to label it, or find a way to dismiss it.

Regardless of what the Times calls it, Swoon’s art is incredible. Check out Clint’s feature on her, and if you’re in NYC, check out the show at Deitch. Outsider or not, her work is too good to be missed.

Scenes from my morning on the beautiful NYC subway:

1:

A subway ad? Come on, Trent, are you really that desperate for fans that you have to advertise next to light beer and divorce attorneys? It’s only a matter of time ’til it gets slapped with a “Lose Weight Now!” sticker, and I want to be there to see it when it does.

2: An 8-10 year-old girl and her overweight mother enter the train and stand next to me. They are facing each other, so that the girl is facing me and the mother has her back to me. The girl is holding on the the center pole, and the mother isn’t holding on to anything — every time the train lurches, she falls backwards and topples into me. After this happens a few times, she eventually does it again, and drops her book. A man sitting next to her picks it up and hands it to her. She mumbles a “sorry” and “thanks” to him, and this conversation ensues:

Little Girl: “But you didn’t say ‘I’m sorry’”!
Mother: “Yes I did.”
Little Girl: “No you didn’t. Not to that man right there!” [pointing at me]

The half-assed, coerced “sorry” from the mother meant nothing to me. But the little girl, remembering the lessons in politeness we’re all taught as children but find so easy to forget as adults, made my day.