What kind of art deserves—or is denigrated by—the term “outsider”?  For over a century, since avant-garde European artists began to turn to folk art, African art, and the art of the insane for inspiration.  Outsider art, it’s been said, should be anti-intellectual—that is, naïve or visionary, uncorrupted by influences from theory, aesthetic traditions, or other artists.  Outsider artists don’t often think of themselves as artists; they live far from cultural capitals like New York or Paris.  Instead of hanging out with other artists, they are reclusive or eccentric in some way: They may be intensely spiritual, socially marginalized or economically disenfranchised.   

              —Julia Canigla, "Art From the Inside" Minneapolis City Pages, 1966

              Probably no art caters to the public’s hatred of the establishment as outsider art.  The work of the uneducated, the insane, the criminal and underprivileged, outsider art preserves a myth of esthetic purity for our culture tired of experts. The outsider artist has not suffered the deforming influence of art school.  Motivated merely by the joy of making art, the outsider is totally unaware, or so the story goes, of the history of art in the marketplace.

               The lives of outsider artists, moreover, are frog prince parables. The biographical labels beside outsider works upstage the picture, telling stories of broken homes, poverty, physical or mental disability and unrelieved bad luck. Then at last, the sufferer takes up brush or chisel and finds satisfaction.  

               —Wendy Steiner, "In Love with the Myth of the Outsider" Art View, New York Times, 1996

               No longer a rogue genre, outsider art commands attention more than ever before, having captured the popular imagination as a form of unharnessed and pure creativity.  In turn both the public and the market have embraced the notion of an “authentic art” that provides an alternative to the elitism and commercialism of the professional contemporary art world.

              —Daniel Wojcik, Author, "Outsider Art: Visionary Worlds and Trauma" 2016