By Gabriel Coxhead
Published: October 18 2009 19:04 | Last updated: October 18 2009 19:04
The very idea of a gallery dedicated to exhibiting “outsider art” is ironic enough. This is a genre, after all, defined by its segregation from mainstream society, whose works were typically never intended for public display, and whose practitioners often never considered what they made to be art at all. For such a gallery, then, to open in London during the annual gala for the global art world that is the Frieze Art Fair seems doubly incongruous.
“Opening during Frieze was intended to be provocative, to start debates about the nature of art,” says James Brett, the force behind the Museum of Everything. Most of the gallery’s 200 or so pieces are drawn from his own collection. “The sort of work we’re exhibiting embodies the most essential motive for making art, where it’s simply about personal creativity and expression, and has nothing whatsoever to do with selling work or building a career.”
Instead, the motivation is often a mystical or visionary experience, a response to physical or mental disability, or simply a secret, reclusive monomania. “We’re hoping to challenge those sections of the art world who don’t see this kind of thing as ‘art’, who certainly would never buy it; to make them question what it is about art that truly interests them.”
Untitled work by Alexandre Lobanov, Image from The Financial Times
Read More At http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/f19a5064-ba79-11de-9dd7-00144feab49a.html
