Outsider art. From the Margins to the Marketplace

"Outsider Art" is work produced outside the mainstream of modern art by self-taught visionaries, spiritualists, eccentrics, recluses, psychiatric patients, criminals, and others beyond the perceived margins of society. Coined in 1972 the term is derived from ´art brut´, which the artist Jean Dubuffet began promoting just after the Second World War. Both focus on the idea of a ´raw´, untaught creativity, which is still a contentious and much-debated issue. Is this a natural phenomenon, requiring only the right circumstances (isolation or alienation) to be revealed; or is it more like a mirage projected by the very culture it is supposed to be escaping from?