Podcast: Art World Outliers

There are surprisingly few professionally made podcasts dealing with contemporary art, so I was really pleased to come across this series put out by Art Agency, Partners (a Sotheby's-owned art advising service). 

My favorite episode features the brilliant curator Lynne Cooke, who organized the recent exhibition “Outliers and American Vanguard Art” at Washington D.C.’s National Gallery earlier this year. Cooke’s exhibition was one of the most thoughtful, comprehensive, transhistorical, and joyful shows I’ve ever seen, and hearing the curator speak on her fascination with the artworks she chose adds a valuable dimension to it. 

“Outsider art” is a fraught, problematic category that has engendered a century’s worth of political debate within American art and culture. Cooke traces this complex history and argues for the introduction of another set of terminology when talking about artists who don’t fit the mainstream, art-world mold, whatever that may be. The term “outliers” from the exhibition title is one of these terms—partly because it connotes exceptionalism rather than simply marginalization, as so many previous exhibitions of work by so-called outsiders have relied on. 

Cooke does not shy away from the complex political terrain in which her exhibition takes place, but she navigates it expertly.