Madge Gill

Untitled, two sided drawing #2 Ink on paper, back graphite on paper

Anthropologists of the Mind

by John Holt

“And yet real art brut, that is to say individualistic creation against the force of winds and of tides and even at the cost of one’s own life, one’s health, one’s mental equilibrium, or which occurs as the consequence of previous disasters: the two sometimes being indivisible. The visceral art of these self-taught creators, often illiterate or on the edge of sanity, occasionally continues to surprise us.”

So wrote Laurent Danchin in the first issue of Raw Vision, (which describes itself as a journal of Outsider Art, Art Brut, Contemporary Folk Art and Marginal Art) published in 1989. At a recent symposium on Outsider Art at Tate Modern, (an event to which there were far more subscribers than could be accommodated, such is the appeal it seems, of Outsider Art), it appeared to me that some experts in the field of “Outsider Art” have an ethos similar to that of the anthropologist with their voyeuristic gaze, appropriating the work of those they deem exciting, primitive and exotic.

In some ways one can understand the propensity to look to the “other” (the Outsider) for a more exhilarating model of cultural thought and consciousness, due it seems to dissatisfaction with the materiality and elitism of Western art practice and culture.

“ . . . bored by the interminable degeneracy of fine art, whose evolution has led to a series of even more vain and intellectualised performances which are hard to follow. A new public is becoming apparent, looking for something else: signs symbols, myths even rituals which can help it survive in this new hyper-sophisticated civilisation which has severed man’s links forever from his peasant ancestors.” (Laurent Danchin. 1988.)

Working in a secure hospital with an innovative and perceptive group of artist-patients I was told by one man that he did not want to be marginalised, he did not want to be an “Outsider”. He just wanted to be accepted for what he was and he resented the implication that he was "other".

Jazzing the Beast, or the Web as Cultural Revolution

by Wildcat 

Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

                                                      --William James

Last night, I watched the obscure film Prospero Books once again, and though I was entranced by the movie’s sheer exuberance, my mind kept wandering back to a connection I was formulating between the web and the movie itself. 

The carnival of images, references, naked bodies, and incandescent speeches (by the incomparable John Gielgud) helped me understand an important aspect of life online. 

Greenaway uses the cinematic medium to conjure a certain hypnotic state in the viewer, a state not unlike the one we experience when zipping across the seemingly infinite landscape of the infoverse.  But where I find the comparison between this movie and the web most striking is in the ultimate impression one receives: 

Photo by Christopher Chan

Diligent Indolence

by Andrew Seal

I can never entirely make up my mind whether it’s the Internet having a series of identity crises or just me. The blogosphere—that merry menagerie of stampeding independent minds—seems bent on making highly incompatible claims about its present capacities and future possibilities. It lives in constant oscillation between self-analysis and self-promotion, between an idea of itself as a smart-ass replacement for obsolete “old media” and an idea of itself as an emergent form of communication and expression, concerned less with the obsolescence of anything than with the improvement of itself.

I read one ode to bloggy self-definition, and I think, awesome, this might just work. People are ready to hold themselves accountable (or to allow their commenters to hold them accountable) in a way never before possible, to try to make something out of the opportunities of blogging that is really new, not just more “interactive” and more “democratic” than journalism. These bloggers believe that the instantaneity of blogging means that we can reconceptualize errant trains of thought at warp speed; someone points out the flaw in our logic or the fatal exception to our rule, and we can revise, reformulate, rearticulate, or even just annotate our way to a better, more complete idea of what we’re talking about. We can even find out the dimensions of our ignorance, and allow ourselves to be steered toward whole shelves of writers and cabinets of ideas we never knew existed.

Then I read a prideful rejection of “mainstream,” “old media” or (confusingly now that most things are eventually digitized) “print” journalism—favorite targets: The New York Times Book Review, anything an academic writes, and one dour critic named J. Wood—and I think, jeez, how many babies are flying out the window on our way to a better, bloggier, bathwater-free world. It’s not recognition we’re hooting for; it’s fewer professional critics. A lot of professional criticism is dreck, we note not too circumspectly, and a lot of it is about the same books, we further note quite correctly, so this elaborate system that produces all this repetitive dreck really isn’t doing its job, which we assume to be the production of vigorous analyses of life-altering books. The abject failure of print-based journalism tout court is an unmistakable sign that the times have changed, and these fancy-pants aren’t meeting their readers’ needs any longer. Economic hardship is a manifest judgment of obsolescence and inadequacy; shuttered doors means outdated values.

Cultural Darwinism aside, it is, I think, a teensy bit presumptuous to think that the economic collapse of print journalism (particularly in the book review sections) is causally connected to an absolute failure or insufficiency of its ideas and ideals—hierarchical editing structures and professional employees with specialized educational backgrounds—to adapt to changing demands and new possibilities for criticism. The economic side of newspaper and magazine publishing is the sum of so many more factors than blogging ever faces that it is really pretty thick to come to any kind of conclusion about the relative appeal of old media criticism versus blogging/amateur criticism based on the economic fates of newspapers or print-based journalism. Nothing about blogging is vindicated by the closing of a single newspaper.

City of Words by Vito Acconci, 1999

Amateurism, the Internet and Literary Criticism

by Nigel Beale

“What the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment. The information business is being transformed by the Internet into the sheer noise of a hundred million bloggers all simultaneously talking about themselves.”

Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is Killing our Culture

According to The Oxford English Dictionary the word amateur refers to one who loves, is fond of, or has a taste for, anything; one who cultivates anything as a pastime. But there’s also a more derogatory meaning: someone who isn’t a professional; who is unprofessional, who practices an art or science unskillfully; an unpaid dabbler; inexpert.

It is across these axes that much of the debate about information and truth on the Internet occurs.

Some months ago I engaged in a discussion with Ronan MacDonald about his book The Death of the Critic.

While it is primarily about the demise of evaluative criticism, the book does have things to say about the Internet. Thanks to blogs and burgeoning user content platforms, ("the pullulation of commentary," as MacDonald puts it), everyone today is a critic. We can all now vent and emote. Push back, blow off, swoon and fawn in public cyberspace. ‘People power’ dominates the age. This is not necessarily a good thing, according to McDonald. It’s killing off a breed of professional, educated, capital ‘C’ Critic ‘essential to the survival of culture.’

Jurgen Habermass, one of Europe’s most influential social thinkers, would agree. Here he is quoted in Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur:

“The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralized access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus.”

“Any intellectual,” as Keen follows up, “is just another strident voice in the cacophony.”

Given the number of critical voices now squalling, it’s hardly surprising that intelligent, informed ones are difficult to hear. This is troubling. Critics as objective instructors, expert judges, provide a salutary service, says MacDonald, brushing as they do against “the grain of received wisdoms and tired forms. By bringing the shock of the new to wide audiences, they fight against conservatism and stagnation.”

Regrettably, academic critics seem to have yielded the floor to bloggers and reviewers many of whom share little more than personal reactions and subjective enthusiasms. Assuming the attitude that if anyone can be a critic, then surely there is no need for specialized professionals devoted to the task, academics have taken their non-evaluative teddy bears and stomped back up the stairs of ivory towerdom.

Adolf Wölfli

The Creative Womb

Things just happen: that’s the sum total of all wisdom.

-Robert Musil, from Young Torles

Robert Musil’s witty epigraph appears just that at first. But after awhile, some deep truth to his maxim begins to dawn on me. How is it that “things just happen”?

As I continue to write poems, the nature of the creative process is slowly being revealed to me. In addition to the literal act of creating poems, I am also discovering the creative process as a powerful analogy to life. For years the creative process was an impenetrable mystery. I was under the illusion that I created, that I was the doer of my artwork. Since my recent experiences, these illusions have all fallen away, allowing me to see into the true nature of how artistic forms are brought into existence.