art brut

PopMatters publishes an essay arguing that art brut, the outsider art tradition, offers a useful lens for understanding modern internet culture. The piece explores how untrained, raw creative expression online echoes the qualities long associated with outsider art, and what that parallel reveals about how people create and share today.

A new essay on PopMatters explores what art brut, the outsider art tradition, can tell us about modern internet culture. It argues that the raw, unfiltered creativity of self-taught artists offers a useful lens for understanding how people make and share work online, outside institutional gatekeeping and mainstream artistic norms.