Art, Inside and Out
by Martin Herbert

LONDON — What connects a dead Chicago janitor with a rich Brit who's friendly with Elton John? Only this: they're both very successful artists, and their work is diametrically opposed. The former, Henry Darger, worked in the recognized genre of Outsider Art. The latter, Sam Taylor-Wood, has defined a new one. We might call it Insider Art.

When Darger died in 1973, he was penniless, friendless, and the author one of the longest works of fiction ever written. Born in 1892, he worked as a janitor in Chicago-area hospitals pretty much all his adult life. After he knocked off cleaning toilets he'd go home and start his real job — an obsessive catalogue of watercolour images and text which ended up as the 15,145-page illustrated book discovered after his death, catchily titled "The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion."

Full of beauty, aggression and awkward, disturbing sexuality, Darger's illustrations formed the contents of a recent exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, as well as inspiring a rash of fan websites and a breezeblock of a biography. It was also discovered that he'd produced a second work, a mere 10,000 pages, and a 5,000-page autobiography. Not even Proust could have gotten that many pages out of mopping floors.

The art world should have a hard time contextualizing someone like Darger, but no. The designation of Outsider Artist was coined precisely for the work of artists like him. Got some lone genius who never went to art school but can't stop imaginary worlds from bursting, fully formed, from their forehead and onto canvas? Here's your label.

Outsider Art is often terrific. The only problem with it is that, indirectly, it's also partly responsible for some of the crappiest contemporary art in the world.

How so? Well, bear in mind that stylistic change in contemporary art is almost comically dialectical. Splashy, psychological Abstract Expressionist paintings (Jackson Pollock, etc.) in the '50s begat commercialist Pop Art in the '60s, which begat otherworldly Minimalism in the '70s, which begat splashy painting again in the '80s. Oh, there were a bunch of other styles confusing the issue, but there's your broad-stroke view. And it's happening again. Outsider Art may not be the single hottest format in the artworld right now, but it's gotten at least one seal of approval: it has produced its opposite.

It's a safe bet that Sam Taylor-Wood has never cleaned a toilet in her life.

Her most recent solo exhibit in London was at the big Hayward Gallery, where to have a one-person show is an honor typically reserved for artists with a couple of decades of work under their belt. Heavy hitters like Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, and Bruce Nauman have their solo shows here. How did Taylor-Wood, who has been on the scene for maybe 10 years and a notable presence for maybe five, pull this off?

Well, it doesn't hurt that she's married to the hippest dealer in London. The Eton-educated son of an English Lord, Jay Jopling runs White Cube gallery, home to Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and many other controversial "Young British Artists," as they are known, and he pretty much owns the London artworld — any time any of his artists have an exhibition, blanket press coverage is guaranteed. That's how we lucky Brits got to hear so much about Sam Taylor-Wood's recovery from cancer prior to her own show at White Cube in early 2002.

Generally, a show in a classy gallery is arranged six months to a year in advance. Artworld scuttlebutt has it that Jopling offered his wife her show six weeks before it was due to open. With no new work to exhibit, she seems to have rushed around and photographed some lachrymose cows and rotting fruit, turned the images into super-expensive lightboxes, and banged them up. The uniformly positive reviews declaimed that it was about Taylor-Wood's heroic triumph over her illness. Good that she recovered, and of course she has a right to talk about it, but — and this is difficult territory — that doesn't mean she'll make good art out of her experience. And so far she hasn't.

For her Hayward show, she reminded everyone again that she'd been ill with an advertisement — plastered all over the London Underground — showing one of her photographs, entitled Self Portrait in Single Breasted Suit with Hare. This featured Taylor-Wood holding up an unfortunate, lop-eared animal that was probably shot at one of Lord Jopling's weekend hunts. The title's references to mastectomy and hair loss were hard to miss, particularly if you'd been anywhere near a British paper's culture section recently.

The show was a triumph of networking for Jopling and Taylor-Wood. As art it was a bust, with the artist's edgy, early work tucked in a corner to make more room for the recent, vacuous stuff: big videos of people miming to opera and sitting around looking bored, a series of photographs showing people looking bored in lofts and a multi-screen video of a party, where the guests — including Ray Winstone and Marianne Faithfull — look kind of bored.

So did a lot of the viewers, who had been huckstered into believing Taylor-Wood must be the artist of her generation simply because she's everywhere. She's even on the high street: In 2000 a giant, panoramic Taylor-Wood photograph wrapped the whole of Selfridges' swanky department store on London's shopping mecca, Oxford Street. When a friend of mine who edits an art magazine recently found himself in need of a cover story on short notice, whom did he call? There was no chance she'd refuse the publicity. Her work supposedly interrogates the interface of art and fashion and mass culture. Except that its criticality has been vaporizing since 1997, since when she has produced stage-show backdrops for the Pet Shop Boys, made a film featuring a naked Kylie Minogue and, in the past year, directed a video for Elton John.

So, can success in the fine arts be bought, or finagled through contacts? Apparently so; but talent can't. We got a beta version of Insider Art — which might be defined as "self-promotion over talent" — in the New York artworld of the 1980s prior to the stock market crash, with artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, and Julian Schnabel.

The latter in particular, a painter who got a lot of mileage and money out of daubing on canvases covered with broken plates, made risible statements to the effect that there were only two important artists in the 20th century: Picasso and himself. He later made a biopic, Basquiat, for which he had no qualms about making ersatz versions of the latter's canvases, or about having Gary Oldman play the naturally weighty Schnabel as slim, dancing, utterly charismatic and loved by everyone.

Before dying of a heroin overdose at 27, the black Basquiat — a protégé of Andy Warhol's — was assiduously marketed as a noble savage; for a while he lived — some say was locked — in the basement of his dealer, and his graffiti-like paintings often sold while the oil was still wet. A critical industry that refuses to admit he was a stylist has ensured that the price of his paintings has continued to rise: at auction they recently hit the $1.5 million mark.

In the UK, there are few comparable success stories: only Damien Hirst and, increasingly, Sam Taylor-Wood. In a sense, in London the 80s revival is in full swing, except that it's been finessed — now what you know apparently matters not at all, and who you know is everything.

One wonders what Henry Darger would have made of it.

E-mail Martin Herbert at MartinLHerbert@aol.com.