Quotes & Sayings About Outsider Art

I think that everyone who does music, and everyone who does art, or everyone who decides at a young age that they're gonna do that, is someone who feels like an outsider. The world is not really set up for that. — El-P

Art is always criticized and always an outsider gets the blame. — Ville Valo

take a salad of pills and hit the floor — Pat Smith

End Of Men is a concoction of sex, outsider art, filmmaking and death including an Italian island — C.B. Murphy

Art is an outsider, a gypsy over the face of the earth. — Robert Henri

Art can permeate the very deepest part of us, where no words exist. — Eileen Miller

I think comedy is an angry art form; it's an outsider art form. Anger and comedy are really connected. If I'm angry about something I will try to think about something funny about it to lighten the load of the anger and cope with the anger. — Margaret Cho

A shit show is chaos as religion, because "God is dead." A shit show all by itself is usually a crime. A shit show when put on paper or to music, is no longer whirling, twirling chaos. Then it's art. We can take it on the road, and we can travel with it. Have shit show, will travel. — Fiona Helmsley

In reference to Einstein's definition of insanity...
No Mr. Einstein, that is not insanity, that is autism. — Eileen Miller

Autism: Where the "randomness of life" collides and clashes with an individual"s need for the sameness~ — Eileen Miller

My characteristics as a scientist stem from a non-conformist upbringing, a sense of being something of an outsider, and looking for different perceptions in everything from novels, to art to experimental results. I like complexity and am delighted by the unexpected. Ideas interest me. — Peter C. Doherty

THERE ARE ENORMOUS HOLES IN MY EDUCATION. I left college in March of my freshman year and never went back. I've never read Moby-Dick and it's probably too late now. I know nothing about the history of music or the history of art except what I've learned through osmosis. But Outsider Art is its own context. I don't have to know all about the Impressionists or the Abstract Expressionists. I don't have to be able to fit this art into any historic chronology. I don't feel like an ignoramus. Irony of ironies, I don't feel like an outsider - to fall in love I only need eyes. — Abigail Thomas

I cared nothing; my point of view in that instance, as in all others like it, was, that if the paper chose to send an outsider and an ignoramus to criticise works of art - especially the works of a new and tentative and experimental school - then, on the head of the paper let the just doom fall. — Arthur Machen

Hopper invites us to feel empathy with the woman in her isolation. She seems dignified and generous, only perhaps a little too trusting, a little naive - as if she has knocked against a hard corner of the world. Hopper puts us on her side, the side of the outsider against the insiders. The figures in Hopper's art are not opponents of home per se; it is simply that in a variety of undefined ways, home appears to have betrayed them, forcing them out into the night or onto the road. — Alain De Botton

I'm definitely not an outsider artist. I'm very much an insider artist. I get written about in art magazines, and I'm not, like, in a mental institution. I'm a regular guy who went to art school. — David Shrigley

The only thing I collect is art. I collect it because I like looking at it. A lot of it is really personal stuff that my friends have made, paintings that my husband's mother made, and things that I bought. I buy abstract art on eBay, and I buy some outsider art on eBay, or what is called folk art, I buy a lot of. I have a lot of professional art work as well as more stuff my friends' kids make. To have a wall of art to look at, I feel really surrounded by love, because so much of the work is related to my friendships. — Kathleen Hanna

Especially for people of our generation, who really celebrated certain attitudes - the outsider, the loner - it can have a real impact on the art when they realize, I have friends, I'm married, or I have kids. That's certainly happened to me. — Adrian Tomine

Perhaps things are most beautiful when they are not quite real; when you look upon a scene as an outsider, and come to possess it in its entirety and forever; when you live in the present with the lucidity and feeling of memory; when, for want of connection, the world deepens and becomes art. — Mark Helprin

Actually, Wilson's art can't fit into these neat categories. My own take is that the best way to think of Wilson is as an outsider musician, but one who actually happens to have a huge amount of talent. Much like, say, Wesley Willis, Wilson is focussed on having huge commercial success, but has little to no idea what actually counts as commercial. He's very easily swayed by people around him, so if he's told he should be doing three-minute pop songs, he does three-minute pop songs, and if he's told he should do epic suites about the American Dream, he does those. But at all times there are two things that remain true about him: he has an unerring ability as an arranger, and a directness that makes his music more communicative than any other music I've ever heard. — Andrew Hickey