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MLA Full: | "Who Gets to Be a 'Real' Artist? (Amateur & Outsider Art): Crash Course Art History #13." YouTube, uploaded by CrashCourse, 25 July 2024, www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGYy7UBf3mQ. |
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APA Full: | CrashCourse. (2024, July 25). Who Gets to Be a "Real" Artist? (Amateur & Outsider Art): Crash Course Art History #13 [Video]. YouTube. https://youtube.com/watch?v=KGYy7UBf3mQ |
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Chicago Full: |
CrashCourse, "Who Gets to Be a 'Real' Artist? (Amateur & Outsider Art): Crash Course Art History #13.", July 25, 2024, YouTube, 11:31, https://youtube.com/watch?v=KGYy7UBf3mQ. |
For centuries, “official” art spaces have shaped whose work gets taken seriously. But there are no required qualifications for making art! In this episode of Crash Course Art History, we’ll explore amateurs and outsiders. We’ll learn how the line separating who’s in and who’s out has shifted over time — and how influences have drifted across it.
Introduction: What Is an Amateur? 00:00
The Origins of "Amateur" 01:05
"Amateur" Women Artists 03:31
Wohaw's Drawings 04:53
Outsider Art & Art Brut 07:05
Review & Credits 09:40
Image Descriptions: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ETiCxe4GrVzFii7dBhF42oHx1EUCCh5y12wbtUjsH8A/edit
Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GW2NKzhpMNMmRyAFJVhFJG9cSfUOMRL-QrcWuHcWcIA/edit?usp=sharing
***
Support us for $5/month on Patreon to keep Crash Course free for everyone forever! https://www.patreon.com/crashcourse
Or support us directly: https://complexly.com/support
Join our Crash Course email list to get the latest news and highlights: https://mailchi.mp/crashcourse/email
Get our special Crash Course Educators newsletter: http://eepurl.com/iBgMhY
Thanks to the following patrons for their generous monthly contributions that help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever:
Emily Beazley, Brandon Thomas, Forrest Langseth, oranjeez, Rie Ohta, Jack Hart, UwU, Leah H., David Fanska, Andrew Woods, Ken Davidian, Stephen Akuffo, Toni Miles, Steve Segreto, Kyle & Katherine Callahan, Laurel Stevens, Krystle Young, Burt Humburg, Scott Harrison, Mark & Susan Billian, Alan Bridgeman, Breanna Bosso, Matt Curls, Jennifer Killen, Jon Allen, Sarah & Nathan Catchings, team dorsey, Bernardo Garza, Trevin Beattie, Eric Koslow, Indija-ka Siriwardena, Jason Rostoker, Siobhán, Ken Penttinen, Nathan Taylor, Barrett Nuzum, Les Aker, William McGraw, ClareG, Rizwan Kassim, Constance Urist, Alex Hackman, kelsey warren, Katie Dean, Stephen McCandless, Wai Jack Sin, Ian Dundore, Caleb Weeks, Vaso
__
Want to find Crash Course elsewhere on the internet?
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Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/TheCrashCourse
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Introduction: What Is an Amateur? 00:00
The Origins of "Amateur" 01:05
"Amateur" Women Artists 03:31
Wohaw's Drawings 04:53
Outsider Art & Art Brut 07:05
Review & Credits 09:40
Image Descriptions: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ETiCxe4GrVzFii7dBhF42oHx1EUCCh5y12wbtUjsH8A/edit
Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GW2NKzhpMNMmRyAFJVhFJG9cSfUOMRL-QrcWuHcWcIA/edit?usp=sharing
***
Support us for $5/month on Patreon to keep Crash Course free for everyone forever! https://www.patreon.com/crashcourse
Or support us directly: https://complexly.com/support
Join our Crash Course email list to get the latest news and highlights: https://mailchi.mp/crashcourse/email
Get our special Crash Course Educators newsletter: http://eepurl.com/iBgMhY
Thanks to the following patrons for their generous monthly contributions that help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever:
Emily Beazley, Brandon Thomas, Forrest Langseth, oranjeez, Rie Ohta, Jack Hart, UwU, Leah H., David Fanska, Andrew Woods, Ken Davidian, Stephen Akuffo, Toni Miles, Steve Segreto, Kyle & Katherine Callahan, Laurel Stevens, Krystle Young, Burt Humburg, Scott Harrison, Mark & Susan Billian, Alan Bridgeman, Breanna Bosso, Matt Curls, Jennifer Killen, Jon Allen, Sarah & Nathan Catchings, team dorsey, Bernardo Garza, Trevin Beattie, Eric Koslow, Indija-ka Siriwardena, Jason Rostoker, Siobhán, Ken Penttinen, Nathan Taylor, Barrett Nuzum, Les Aker, William McGraw, ClareG, Rizwan Kassim, Constance Urist, Alex Hackman, kelsey warren, Katie Dean, Stephen McCandless, Wai Jack Sin, Ian Dundore, Caleb Weeks, Vaso
__
Want to find Crash Course elsewhere on the internet?
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thecrashcourse/
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/YouTubeCrashCourse
Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/TheCrashCourse
CC Kids: http://www.youtube.com/crashcoursekids
Jackson Pollock gained fame and fortune for pouring and dripping paint onto flat canvas.
He basically made spills–intentional though they were– into something cool and valuable. But Pollock wasn’t actually the first person to do this.
That credit goes to Janet Sobel, a middle-aged Ukrainian-American woman who had never taken an art class. She dripped and spilled paint, and also blew and tilted it in different directions, to create the dynamic, marbled surface of this 1945 work, “Milky Way,” at least a year before Pollock created similar work. But it was Pollock who became famous, while Sobel faded into obscurity.
Why did that happen? Why do we take one person’s dripped paint seriously and not the other’s? What’s the difference between just an everyday amateur… and an artist?
Hi! I’m Sarah Urist Green, and this is Crash Course Art History. [THEME MUSIC] We know that Sobel directly influenced Pollock, who first encountered her paintings with art critic Clement Greenberg in 1944. Greenberg was impressed by Sobel’s works and wrote about them.
He considered hers the first truly “all-over pictures” he had ever seen, a term he coined for paintings that don’t really have a focal point and treat the entire surface evenly. Some say the parts of Sobel’s identity that drew attention to her at first also fueled her dismissal. After all, she was an outsider with no formal training.
And it didn’t help that Greenberg described her as a “primitive painter” and “housewife living in Brooklyn.” Essentially, Greenberg positioned her art as less serious than Pollock’s. He considered her an amateur. If you look up synonyms for “amateur,” you get words like “incompetent,” “useless,” or “unskilled.” Pretty harsh.
But society hasn’t always treated amateurs this way. Back in early 18th-century Paris, the term came with some respect. Amateur artists mingled, trained, and exhibited their work with the pros at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, which dominated the arts in France for almost 150 years.
Being an amateur didn’t mean you weren’t good enough to be a professional. It meant you just didn’t need the money. They were rich enough to study art for fun and cultural clout, rather than creating works for wealthy patrons.
And when amateurs weren’t making art themselves, they lectured, published scholarly hot takes, and shaped the tastes of the time. Take a look at this portrait of amateur artist Claude-Henri Watelet. He’s posing casually, implying that he and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, the “professional” artist painting him, are besties.
Watelet is deep in thought about that sculpture of Venus, while holding an art theory book he wrote open to a page of his own artwork. It’s all designed to show us what a serious thinker and artist he is – even though he’s considered an amateur. But, the good vibes didn’t last.
By the mid-18th century, art criticism had grown more popular and started to appear in newspapers. This meant the wider public started to have opinions about art, and the once-elite class of art lovers and taste-makers didn’t care for this. So the meaning of “amateur” began to drift.
And eventually, the word picked up negative connotations. Folks started using it to refer to anyone who didn’t fit the Academy’s idea of an artist. Women in particular were quickly relegated to the category of “amateur” artists.
When women and girls spent their free time making art, critics didn’t think they were building careers or influencing culture, so they received little official recognition. But that didn't stop them from making art. Women created and displayed works in private, domestic spaces and often expressed creativity through fashion.
Some fashion plates from the time — which functioned sort of like 18th-century Vogue magazines — show women modeling the hottest trends—with art supplies in hand. We’re also continuing to learn more about how some women amateurs made it into Paris’s official art spaces. In recent years, art historians have studied letters written by women who described themselves as students in artist Jacques-Louis David’s prestigious, almost exclusively male studio.
And this young amateur, Alexandrine Brongniart, took drawing lessons from François Gérard, the same artist who painted this famous portrait of her. Unlike the portrait of Watelet, this image doesn’t reveal anything about Brongniart’s artistic life. But a recently discovered version shows her holding a porte-crayon, a drawing tool that says, “I’m a serious artist.” But critics at the time didn’t acknowledge Brongniart as an artist in their reviews of the portrait–to them it wasn’t worth mentioning.
As the years went on, official art spaces in Europe continued to draw distinct lines between the professional and the amateur. But across the Atlantic, some artists in the Americas were working outside those lines altogether. Let’s head to the drawing board.
In 1875, the U. S. government forcefully relocated 72 members of the Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Caddo tribes from Oklahoma to Florida. All were accused of crimes against white settlers and imprisoned for three years at Fort Marion.
In an effort to force them to adopt dominant American customs, they were made to cut their hair, wear military uniforms, and study the Bible. A young Kiowa warrior and artist named Wohaw was among the prisoners. He created sketches during the time he was imprisoned.
Some show his life before incarceration — like this one, of a couple wrapped in a buffalo robe. Others reflect life in captivity, like this drawing of morning lessons, observed by a transparent figure in traditional clothing. After three years in prison, Wohaw had a choice: return to a reservation or continue boarding school up north.
A drawing from around that time echoes his dilemma. On one side, he’s flanked by a buffalo and a Kiowa tipi; on the other, a domestic cow and farm. By then, the U.
S. government had already pushed the Kiowa and other groups off their land, while nearly exterminating the buffalo they depended on. Wohaw’s drawing evokes a feeling of suspension between two cultures — personal to him, but shared by many Indigenous people. In the drawing, Wohaw extends a peace pipe toward both animals.
In life, he returned to a reservation, where he spent the rest of his years. Wohaw didn’t study at an art academy or display work at the Paris salon. But that doesn’t make his art any less impactful, poignant, or worthy of preservation.
In fact, his work has since been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian. But it wasn’t until the 20th century that the mainstream art world started actually paying attention to work by artists like Wohaw. Artists who hadn’t received what “officially” counted as formal training.
This led to new categories for organizing otherwise disparate types of art, which some called outsider art. It was also called self-taught art, visionary art, and intuitive art, among many other terms. In the 1940s, French painter Jean Dubuffet, for example, became fascinated by artwork made by children, incarcerated people, and psychiatric patients.
He described their work as “art brut,” or “raw art.” To him, it was open, honest, and free from rules or greed. That made it better than work made by formally trained artists, at least in the eyes of Dubuffet. In the 1950s and ‘60s, other artists and collectors also became interested in art brut.
But Dubuffet wasn’t having it and started refereeing its boundaries — weeding out the artists he once considered good, but now viewed as too trained or deliberate. Sort of like those people who stop listening to a band once they go “mainstream.” But in defining this group, Dubuffet drew yet another box around who could be considered artists. So, he just created a different, equally limiting definition.
Amateur hour. And also, my friends, one of the many reasons we won’t be officially defining the word “art” in this series. Despite the popularity of art brut, recognition was hard to come by for outsider artists in the 20th century.
Take, for example, artist Martín Ramírez. Born in Mexico, Ramírez moved to the United States in 1925 in search of work to support his family back home. But by 1931, he found himself unemployed, unhoused, and eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia.
He spent the rest of his life in psychiatric institutions, including fifteen years at the DeWitt State Hospital in California. There, he made hundreds of dynamic and complex drawings, using any materials he could find. In this one, geometric patterns close in around a horse and rider, evoking tension between freedom and containment.
A local artist and psychology professor tried to draw attention to Ramírez’s art, arranging exhibitions and mailing drawings to the Guggenheim Museum. Official recognition did ultimately come for Ramírez, but it wasn’t until long after his death. These stories of who counts as an artist are powerful, and still impact us today.
The lines that divide inside and outside art worlds can seem like they’re constantly shifting — because they are. Art is too slippery of a concept to capture with stark lines. And the value of art is wrapped up in so many biases, like those around class, gender, and race.
In reality, art gets made under a lot of different circumstances. In official schools and light-filled studios, yes. But also in hospitals, prisons, and homes.
There’s no one road that leads to being an artist, and recognition by the powers that be is unpredictable and fleeting. The more we explore art and artists outside of official spaces, the more we complicate what it means to be inside or outside, amateur or professional. And today, art historians recognize that it’s not important to know who’s “in” or “out” but to instead explore the dynamic web of influences that inform all artists’ work.
Yesterday’s amateur is today’s subject of a massive museum show. Today’s hot artist at auction might be relegated to museum storage tomorrow. And who knows what’s in store for today’s amateurs!
Let’s all be on the lookout. In our next episode, we’ll explore the overlap between art and design. I’ll see you there.
Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Art History which was filmed at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields and was made with the help of all these professional people. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can join our community on Patreon.
He basically made spills–intentional though they were– into something cool and valuable. But Pollock wasn’t actually the first person to do this.
That credit goes to Janet Sobel, a middle-aged Ukrainian-American woman who had never taken an art class. She dripped and spilled paint, and also blew and tilted it in different directions, to create the dynamic, marbled surface of this 1945 work, “Milky Way,” at least a year before Pollock created similar work. But it was Pollock who became famous, while Sobel faded into obscurity.
Why did that happen? Why do we take one person’s dripped paint seriously and not the other’s? What’s the difference between just an everyday amateur… and an artist?
Hi! I’m Sarah Urist Green, and this is Crash Course Art History. [THEME MUSIC] We know that Sobel directly influenced Pollock, who first encountered her paintings with art critic Clement Greenberg in 1944. Greenberg was impressed by Sobel’s works and wrote about them.
He considered hers the first truly “all-over pictures” he had ever seen, a term he coined for paintings that don’t really have a focal point and treat the entire surface evenly. Some say the parts of Sobel’s identity that drew attention to her at first also fueled her dismissal. After all, she was an outsider with no formal training.
And it didn’t help that Greenberg described her as a “primitive painter” and “housewife living in Brooklyn.” Essentially, Greenberg positioned her art as less serious than Pollock’s. He considered her an amateur. If you look up synonyms for “amateur,” you get words like “incompetent,” “useless,” or “unskilled.” Pretty harsh.
But society hasn’t always treated amateurs this way. Back in early 18th-century Paris, the term came with some respect. Amateur artists mingled, trained, and exhibited their work with the pros at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, which dominated the arts in France for almost 150 years.
Being an amateur didn’t mean you weren’t good enough to be a professional. It meant you just didn’t need the money. They were rich enough to study art for fun and cultural clout, rather than creating works for wealthy patrons.
And when amateurs weren’t making art themselves, they lectured, published scholarly hot takes, and shaped the tastes of the time. Take a look at this portrait of amateur artist Claude-Henri Watelet. He’s posing casually, implying that he and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, the “professional” artist painting him, are besties.
Watelet is deep in thought about that sculpture of Venus, while holding an art theory book he wrote open to a page of his own artwork. It’s all designed to show us what a serious thinker and artist he is – even though he’s considered an amateur. But, the good vibes didn’t last.
By the mid-18th century, art criticism had grown more popular and started to appear in newspapers. This meant the wider public started to have opinions about art, and the once-elite class of art lovers and taste-makers didn’t care for this. So the meaning of “amateur” began to drift.
And eventually, the word picked up negative connotations. Folks started using it to refer to anyone who didn’t fit the Academy’s idea of an artist. Women in particular were quickly relegated to the category of “amateur” artists.
When women and girls spent their free time making art, critics didn’t think they were building careers or influencing culture, so they received little official recognition. But that didn't stop them from making art. Women created and displayed works in private, domestic spaces and often expressed creativity through fashion.
Some fashion plates from the time — which functioned sort of like 18th-century Vogue magazines — show women modeling the hottest trends—with art supplies in hand. We’re also continuing to learn more about how some women amateurs made it into Paris’s official art spaces. In recent years, art historians have studied letters written by women who described themselves as students in artist Jacques-Louis David’s prestigious, almost exclusively male studio.
And this young amateur, Alexandrine Brongniart, took drawing lessons from François Gérard, the same artist who painted this famous portrait of her. Unlike the portrait of Watelet, this image doesn’t reveal anything about Brongniart’s artistic life. But a recently discovered version shows her holding a porte-crayon, a drawing tool that says, “I’m a serious artist.” But critics at the time didn’t acknowledge Brongniart as an artist in their reviews of the portrait–to them it wasn’t worth mentioning.
As the years went on, official art spaces in Europe continued to draw distinct lines between the professional and the amateur. But across the Atlantic, some artists in the Americas were working outside those lines altogether. Let’s head to the drawing board.
In 1875, the U. S. government forcefully relocated 72 members of the Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Caddo tribes from Oklahoma to Florida. All were accused of crimes against white settlers and imprisoned for three years at Fort Marion.
In an effort to force them to adopt dominant American customs, they were made to cut their hair, wear military uniforms, and study the Bible. A young Kiowa warrior and artist named Wohaw was among the prisoners. He created sketches during the time he was imprisoned.
Some show his life before incarceration — like this one, of a couple wrapped in a buffalo robe. Others reflect life in captivity, like this drawing of morning lessons, observed by a transparent figure in traditional clothing. After three years in prison, Wohaw had a choice: return to a reservation or continue boarding school up north.
A drawing from around that time echoes his dilemma. On one side, he’s flanked by a buffalo and a Kiowa tipi; on the other, a domestic cow and farm. By then, the U.
S. government had already pushed the Kiowa and other groups off their land, while nearly exterminating the buffalo they depended on. Wohaw’s drawing evokes a feeling of suspension between two cultures — personal to him, but shared by many Indigenous people. In the drawing, Wohaw extends a peace pipe toward both animals.
In life, he returned to a reservation, where he spent the rest of his years. Wohaw didn’t study at an art academy or display work at the Paris salon. But that doesn’t make his art any less impactful, poignant, or worthy of preservation.
In fact, his work has since been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian. But it wasn’t until the 20th century that the mainstream art world started actually paying attention to work by artists like Wohaw. Artists who hadn’t received what “officially” counted as formal training.
This led to new categories for organizing otherwise disparate types of art, which some called outsider art. It was also called self-taught art, visionary art, and intuitive art, among many other terms. In the 1940s, French painter Jean Dubuffet, for example, became fascinated by artwork made by children, incarcerated people, and psychiatric patients.
He described their work as “art brut,” or “raw art.” To him, it was open, honest, and free from rules or greed. That made it better than work made by formally trained artists, at least in the eyes of Dubuffet. In the 1950s and ‘60s, other artists and collectors also became interested in art brut.
But Dubuffet wasn’t having it and started refereeing its boundaries — weeding out the artists he once considered good, but now viewed as too trained or deliberate. Sort of like those people who stop listening to a band once they go “mainstream.” But in defining this group, Dubuffet drew yet another box around who could be considered artists. So, he just created a different, equally limiting definition.
Amateur hour. And also, my friends, one of the many reasons we won’t be officially defining the word “art” in this series. Despite the popularity of art brut, recognition was hard to come by for outsider artists in the 20th century.
Take, for example, artist Martín Ramírez. Born in Mexico, Ramírez moved to the United States in 1925 in search of work to support his family back home. But by 1931, he found himself unemployed, unhoused, and eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia.
He spent the rest of his life in psychiatric institutions, including fifteen years at the DeWitt State Hospital in California. There, he made hundreds of dynamic and complex drawings, using any materials he could find. In this one, geometric patterns close in around a horse and rider, evoking tension between freedom and containment.
A local artist and psychology professor tried to draw attention to Ramírez’s art, arranging exhibitions and mailing drawings to the Guggenheim Museum. Official recognition did ultimately come for Ramírez, but it wasn’t until long after his death. These stories of who counts as an artist are powerful, and still impact us today.
The lines that divide inside and outside art worlds can seem like they’re constantly shifting — because they are. Art is too slippery of a concept to capture with stark lines. And the value of art is wrapped up in so many biases, like those around class, gender, and race.
In reality, art gets made under a lot of different circumstances. In official schools and light-filled studios, yes. But also in hospitals, prisons, and homes.
There’s no one road that leads to being an artist, and recognition by the powers that be is unpredictable and fleeting. The more we explore art and artists outside of official spaces, the more we complicate what it means to be inside or outside, amateur or professional. And today, art historians recognize that it’s not important to know who’s “in” or “out” but to instead explore the dynamic web of influences that inform all artists’ work.
Yesterday’s amateur is today’s subject of a massive museum show. Today’s hot artist at auction might be relegated to museum storage tomorrow. And who knows what’s in store for today’s amateurs!
Let’s all be on the lookout. In our next episode, we’ll explore the overlap between art and design. I’ll see you there.
Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Art History which was filmed at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields and was made with the help of all these professional people. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can join our community on Patreon.