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What is Art Brut? Hint, it is not hulking art that shoves and tries to intimidate other art. Brut art is known by several names including raw art, visionary art, vernacular, naive and primitive art.

-anti-bourgeois in tone and abound with calls for audiences to turn away from the accepted (and acceptable) products of culture, which he saw as being rendered lifeless by virtue of their very acceptability. ‘Art, by its very essence, is of the new’, he wrote in 1963, ‘We expect art to uproot us, to unhinge doors.’As far as Dubuffet was concerned this could not occur in the context of what he referred to as the dull, ‘hollow works’ produced by and for mainstream taste: ‘When the pompous platforms of Culture are erected, and awards and laurels come raining down, then flee as fast as you can, there’ll be little hope for art. If art did once exist here, it’s already gone by now, it hurried off for a change of air. It’s allergic to the air of collective approval.’

I’m tempted to go off on a rant here in which I explain how by defining art that is embraced by the mainstream as less revolutionary and thus has less aesthetic merit then raw art - any art not accepted by the mainstream is automatically a purer art, real art, the pinnacle of artness comes full circle to be elitist and engenders its own subset of bourgeois attitude. The concept that this primitive art is so complex and new that it is beyond the aesthetic abilities of the masses to understand and appreciate does primitive art no favors. OK that turned into a rant anyway. Raw art is frequently very good to great and while its merits compared to various historical schools of art like the Romantics, Neoclassical, or the Impressionists or Asian Dynasty art might make for some lively dinner debate it would ultimately be better for raw art and its practitioners to define their creations within the context of their  sensibilities rather then some perverse ratio where high mass disapproval equates to the best quality. The impressionists were the primitive artists of their day. Monet’s painting were described as simply nice dabs of color that lacked the kind of clarity one would expect from a true artist. So how we have Uncle Josh with a Manet hanging in his bathroom thus to the elite school of raw artists Josh’s appreciation relegates impressionism to an artistic yawn.

-These artists derive everything - subjects, choice of materials, means of transposition, rhythms, styles of writing, etc. - from their own depths, and not from the conventions of classical or fashionable art.

Some excellent examples of raw art here, THE THREADS OF WAR

Thomas Jefferson was our first Secretary of State and  some of us have noticed the standards for that job have been noticeably lowered, Ex-aide says Rice misled Congress on Iran

Flynt Leverett, who worked on the National Security Council when it was headed by Rice, said a proposal vetted by Tehran’s most senior leaders was sent to the United States in May 2003 and was akin to the 1972 U.S. opening to China.

Speaking at a conference on Capitol Hill, Leverett said he was confident it was seen by Rice and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell but “the administration rejected the overture.”

Rice’s spokesman denied she misled Congress and reiterated that she did not see the proposal.

Should we have a SOS that suffers from Selective Memory Syndrome.