Cover Visual: Mitsuru Tateishi
On Art Brut
Isil Ezgi Celik has contributed to the Sense and Sensibility of Madness: Disrupting Normalcy in the Litterature and in the Arts with her work entitled Art Brut: The Sensibility of Outsiders in the Era of Late Capitalism and by designing the book’s cover referring to Art Brut (Marginal Art) creator Mitsuru Tateishi’s work. Here you can find the abstract of her textual work and the link to access the full publication:
For the last two decades, a form of art that originated in France around 1945 has been gaining a reputation as an outstanding mode of artistic expression in North America, Western Europe, and lately also in Japan. This form of art, called art brut, also known as outsider art, is usually categorised as an art of madness, although frequently in a problematic manner.
The radical eccentricity expressed in art brut, owing much of its reputation to the allure of the unknown and the forbidden, was turned into a mere market category in the latest era of capitalist society, thus mitigating its inherent unruly character[…]
This [is] an attempt to reformulate some of the already-existing questions surrounding art brut by placing it in the context of digital capitalism. Instead of providing final answers to these questions, [we] intend to reinstate the original unruly and unsettling character of art brut, despite the influences and manipulations of the art market on this term.
By doing so, [we] hope to foreground the political merit of art brut in the contemporary era.