Installation view of “Outsider Art: The Collection of Victor F. Keen” at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago, Illinois, 2020. Photo by Cheri Eisenberg.
Self-Taught Artists Rise in Price and Popularity in 2023
Self-taught artists, commonly referred to as “Outsider Artists”, which is among the more considerate labels given to artists whose work do not adhere to traditional institutional frameworks, have seen a historic price surge within the art market in 2023. This increase in popularity, visibility, and prices of artworks by artists who do not have formal arts academic training or gallery representation is notable.
In January 2023, Christie’s Outsider and Vernacular Art auction brought in a sale total of $1.6 million (hammer price) within the pre-sale estimates of $1,244,800 to $2,039,700 USD, giving a performance of 31.6% above the pre-sale low estimate.
In Christie’s 2023 auction, Minnie Evans’s Voice of the Third Angel (1963), a work estimated at $7,000 to $10,000 USD, was eventually purchased for $34,000 – 385.7% above the low estimate. Similar works by Evans such as Asian garden (1947) sold in 2013 for $1,500 at Slotin Folk Art, a platform dedicated specifically to self-taught artwork auctions, reflecting a significantly more niche interest in self-taught artwork just a decade prior.
This trend continued for popular self-taught artists such as Thornton Dial, routinely pulling in prices exceeding expectations by large margins, such as Dials’s Untitled, a mixed media on canvas piece made in 1991 selling from Jane Fonda’s collection for $85,000. Dial’s work saw sales in the January 2020 “Outsider” auction at Christie’s as well, with The Beginning of the World (1988-1989) selling for triple the pre-sale low estimate price, achieving a final hammer price of $60,000.
A shift in cultural attitudes and increase in exhibitions featuring self-taught artists are evident in these auction numbers. In 2022, the Smithsonian American Art Museum opened “We Are Made of Stories: Self-Taught Artists in the Robson Family Collection”, and in 2023 “Creating Connections: Self-Taught Artists in the Rosenthal Collection” was exhibited at the Cincinnati Art Museum. The institutional and market acceptance of self-taught artists coincides with a significant shift in the dialogue surrounding these artists. Lisa Slominski has been one of the pioneers in suggesting an alternative anthology for artists tied to a legacy that confines them within a rigid framework, limiting their creative movement. In Nonconformers, a 2022 book by Slominski, she seeks to replace “outsider”, “primitive”, “folk”, and “naïve” with “self-taught”, a term she sees as better acknowledging the unique set of circumstances each artist faced in creating their work without the backing of a traditional art institution, while still giving them agency and artistic merit in their own rite.
Alongside an increasing focus on artist diversity within auctions, the meaningful difference between the pre-sale auction estimate and final purchase price of works by self-taught artists in 2023 generates reasonable cause to believe that 2024 auctions focusing on self-taught art will continue to command an increase in sale prices, though not without the economic impact of the geopolitical tensions on the art market as a whole. This prediction for self-taught art in 2024 will be tested at the Outsider Art Fair in New York (29th February to 3rd March) and Christie’s Outsider Art auction (1st March 2024).
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