How to Look at Outsider Art

Book excerpt: "How to Look at Outsider Art is an invaluable resource to help navigate the aesthetics of this evolving field. It provides an overview of the field's most exciting works, some of them never before published in book form. This book points out the challenges of assessing work, offers guidelines for aesthetic and collecting judgments, and gives accounts of some of the field's spectacular successes. Featuring case studies that provide in-depth examinations of individual works by particular artists and that discuss their critical and popular reception, the book provides the criteria that should be used to evaluate these works of art. All "outsiders" are not created equal, and this book tells why."--BOOK JACKET.