This paper was delivered at the conference ‘Contemporary outsider art; the global context’, University of Melbourne, 24 October 2014. Along with many other speakers, I was responding to the suggestion that outsider art is now ‘in’. Late in the twentieth century, Arthur C Danto spoke of the ‘selective enfranchising’ of outsider artists. 1 Such mainstreaming […]
Can an art work be an oxymoron? A profound Jeff Koons, there’s one. A scintillating Bill Viola, there’s another. But those are oxymorons of the non-technical, colloquial kind; the snide put-down, the cheap shot. What about a more formally constructed oxymoron, one that uses a jolting contradiction for rhetorical effect? Noel McKenna’s current exhibition is […]