Biopic of "little old lady" folk artist a hit in theaters

[beschizza]

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/04/30/biopic-of-little-old-lady.html

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[Lucy_Gothro]

So, when does this lady get a movie? Besides a short from 1950?

Grandma Moses

[knoxblox]

Okay, Ethan Hawke - but I loooove Sally Hawkins. Gotta see this.

[adam_lesh]

“Maud was not a person who travelled to other galleries or saw other art, so there’s a kind of naivete to it,” said Nancy Noble, director of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.

Golly, but critical (or gallerist) condescension towards outsider artists bothers me. The would-be avant-garde artists churned out by MFA mills spend thousands of dollars to learn to mime unencumbered originalty, but when a genuine article comes along, she’s “naive.”

[get_snarky]

Serious question: is there any other genre of art that distinguishes - condescendingly or not - between the trained and untrained? I can’t think of another instance.

[jhbadger]

Who needs a movie when you have one of the Immature Radioactive Samurai Slugs named after you?

[CurtisNewton]

@beschizza

Typically characterised as a “folk artist”, Lewis was self-taught and lived her whole life in poverty. Unable to afford things like canvas, she’d paint on anything from scraps of wood and plywood to thick card stock.

That is not a tear. I have something in my eye. Pollen or something. Just watery eyes, ok?

[Lucy_Gothro]

I don’t think many folks nowadays know who she is, much less who the IRSS are.

[adam_lesh]

Hmmm. Not sure. Fine arts is strange, and different from other areas of the humanities. In my opinion, for the last 70 years or so, the high-art mainstream has largely rejected technical prowess as a marker of quality or significance (or a sufficient qualification for “insider” status), and so critics and historians fall back on biography, cultural context, education, etc., as a means of comprehending and evaluating art. Though, at the same time, it has elevated certain eccentric outsiders, so it’s not so simple.

I think in other arts, like literature and music for example, a person who has worked outside of the mainstream, or who has developed her skills independent of traditional schools, might be labeled, semi-derisively, an “autodidact,” but since technical aptitude matters so much more in those fields, the proof would be in the pudding, as they say.

[nungesser]

I think she’s better known for her house, which she covered nearly all surfaces with paintings, than for the paintings she sold. The entire house is now in the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.