I've been retooling my web site to usher it into the CSS-era, and came across this introduction to a section dealing with outsider art. Written let's say in 1997. Perchance to be expanded:
So, I finally make it to MOMA, the aesthete's cathedral,
only as I wander I'm getting increasingly depressed. It seems more a morgue
than a cathedral because I've seen everything before in books, and lectures,
and slides which, truth be told, were better illuminated and often more
interesting than the masterpiece itself. For a while I console myself with
pomo platitudes about the impossibility of possessing "the original"
unmediated by other representations, but congratulating myself by being
ironical and snide about less informed pilgrims wears a little thin, even
for a bona fide Gen Xer as myself.
Then, perhaps revived a little by De Chirico, it hits me:
I would much rather be in the Charles and Mary Johnson Gourd Museum in Fuquay-Varina,
North Carolina. I'd rather be there because I have no familiar categories
to make sense of it. I'd rather be there because it unnerves me, and reminds
me that there are things in life too strange for knee jerk irony. I'd rather
be there because it will never have a mass market or become a ministry of
culture.
Don't get me wrong, The Charles & Mary Johnson Gourd Museum isn't pure in some stupid Kantian sense: "absolutely" free from commercialism, marketing, or critical paradigms like "outsider art." But it's still strange enough to send my mind skidding off the usual highways taken by a graduate student in English. Suddenly, my mind's an ATV, off the academented highway and roaming over magnificent obsessions so off the map that I refer to them as "alternative sanities."
This is not some cult of the Romantic madman. It is not
the next hot thing. This revolution will not be televised because it is
not, nor ever will be, a revolution.
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