Outsider Аrt in Art Museum: from “Comparative Material” to Art History (Case of the Museum of Modern Art)

The article investigates transformations of the discourse of Outsider Art in the culture of the 20th – early 21st centuries through the perspective of its institutionalization and museumification. The article provides a critical analysis of the curatorial strategies of the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), as well as other American art institutions (National Art Gallery (Washington, DC), Brookline Museum (New York, NY), etc.), the structure of exhibitions and permanent expositions, curatorial texts of projects dedicated to outsider art. The study of the curatorial strategies of MoMA in the Outsider Art’s cases allows us to investigate how the Outsider Art's discourse was developing in the USA, and likewise, conceptual approaches of formation of its description and representation. An important aspect of this study is the examination of paradigmatic links between contemporary art and the work of outsider and self-thought artists in the curatorial, expositional practice of museums of modern art. In the MoMA’s history, legitimation and museumification of Outsider Art and close phenomena had been begun in the 1930s – early 1940s when Alfred Barr interpreted the “marginals” of art as the foundations of Modernism and Avant-garde and included its exhibitions in the strategic courses of the museum’s action. Further, after a long break, the return to work with an art of outsiders and naives had occurred in the second half of the 1980s. In the last twenty years, Outsider Art has begun to be regarded as an equal part of Art History of the 20th century (personal exhibitions, the inclusion of outsider art in the permanent exposition of MoMA, etc.).