Ignoring the content of these artworks has reactionary implications that Dunst has probably not considered; or has considered but ignored in an attempt to gaslight his readers. In the way he has written this article, the horror of the Holocaust, the repression of our Iranian comrades, homophobia, are all dismissed as an “obsession with personal identity.” One has to wonder if the problem with these texts and images, for Dunst, isn’t that they are memoirs, but that they are the stories of people who are gay or queer, aren’t white, or whose whiteness is contingent.

Academically-trained working-class artists who pretend their hard earned knowledge, their BFAs and MFAs, make them immune from this dynamic, are fooling themselves. It is understandable. We do not want to think of ourselves as art world dark-matter, permanent adjuncts, and stalking horses for gentrification. But this is what the art world is making of us, and what we must break from as workers, as artists, and as socialists.

The concept of outsider art, or self-taught art, is a lie. It conceals the actual artistic arguments and content articulated by the artists who are described in this way. While the history of the concept is more complicated, its present usage is bound up with a racial, class and geographic othering, which centers the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois institutional art world (located in New York City first and foremost) as the norm (when it is itself the outlier).

The formation of art enclaves in industrial capitalism, during a century of accelerating aesthetic and conceptual innovation (1850-1950) had a progressive logic. Artists’ innovations fed off their physical proximity to each other. Moreover, these aesthetic and conceptual interventions were often in political sympathy to the industrial working-class concentrated in cities like London, New York, Paris and Berlin. Artists found a radical, and oftentimes working-class, cosmopolitanism in these artistic enclaves. Gentrification had not yet evolved to exploit artists as it does today.

China Miéville’s novella, The Last Days of New Paris, pits the Surrealist art of Paris – literally, or literarily – against the Nazi occupation. The art has manifested itself – becoming “manifs” in the novella’s slang. A giant version of Max Ernst’s The Elephant Celebes – “the most famous manif of Paris” wanders the streets. An exquisite corpse battles a centaur-Panzer tank. People flee Teutonic Arno Breker statutes. Odilon Redon’s “leering ten-legged spider” hunts “at one end of rue Jean Lantier, chattering its big teeth.”