Lenore27 Jan 2004

And yet again I hear the familiar nasal whine of how any artist without any formal training, regardless of actual quality, is the tool of the devil and their work pure garbage.
As an “outside” artist who has been consistently selling my paintings and drawings for the last 15 years, I find your statement insulting and absurd.
The hate (and jealousy) heaped upon outside artists and similar hell-bred poets usually degrade from an honest attempt to raise public awareness of alternative technique to remarkably childish verbal slap-fights or internal circle-jerks that make everyone involved look like socially stunted malcontents. And therein lies the crux of the problem.
It is virtually impossible at any given time to appraise accurately or conclusively artists/poets who have not been dead for roughly a century. In general the most you critics can honestly hope to do is to enlighten your audience as to what an individual artist/poet may be trying to do, and how his/her art relates to the world. But for you to assign any contemporary artist/poet his place (high or low) in history is pure arrogance.
Go ahead and continue to label me for purposes of your own and I will continue to ignore these labels in order to create. Oh and to drop another iconoclastic name… Courbet once said “There can be no schools: there are only painters” The same can be said about poets.