Parallel Visions II "Outsider" and "Insider" Art Today

Felipe Jesus Consalvos... Contemporary Ladies/Buildings (Circa 1920-1950, Mixed media collage on cigar box). From the exhibition Parallel Visions II "Outsider" and "Insider" Art Today, April 5, 2006 - May 26, 2006 at Galerie St. Etienne in New York, NY. "...In 1992, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presented a groundbreaking exhibition titled 'Parallel Visions,' which traced the connections between modern artists and their self-taught colleagues. This exhibition played a major role in establishing the field of 'outsider' art as it exists today. However, just as our view of modernism has changed in the intervening years, the boundaries between 'outsider' and 'insider' art have gradually begun to blur. Many elements that once seemed exclusive to 'outsider' art—obsessive repetition of form, a pop-culture frame of reference, the conjuring of fantastic alternative realities, crudeness of execution and the use of debased, non-art materials—have infiltrated the mainstream art world. Of course, the appropriation of 'low' art attributes by practitioners of 'high' art is nothing new and was in fact the subject of the original 'Parallel Visions' show. It is thus worth asking, what, if anything, has really changed?"