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"Outsider art" gets counted as a thesis at the ultimate insider place: Harvard Law School.

Is this the education you want your lawyer to have? It's lawyerly: looking for loopholes.

IN THE COMMENTS: George underlines a point I only suggested:

It's not Outsider Art.

To be an Outsider Artist, you must possess some combination of the following:

a) an affinity for religious vision(s), especially if they involve Jesus, the Rapture, blood, tree roots, and devils;
b) no formal art training;
c) a grave illness/accident (ideally involving paralysis or loss of a limb;
d) alcoholism;
e) be from the South;
f) have little or no education and absolutely no law degree (unless thereafter you are forcibly imprisoned in a mental institution for 50 years and upon your death the bulk of your work (paper clip lint sculptures) is burned by insensitive orderlies);
g) be white or preferably black and lived a life of isolation from modernity;
h) be willing to do what gallery owners and auctioneers tell you to do;
i) concoct the most positively lurid depictions of sexual organs and acts;
j) wear clothes you have painted;
k) build electromagnetic energy devices and concrete statues in and around your polka-dotted shotgun shack;
l) invent a name for yourself; and
m) be mentally ill or at least seem that way to white-wine sipping Yuppies from Connecticut and Atlanta.

Well delineated, George. And now it occurs to me that law schools might want to enhance diversity by admitting Outsider Law Students.

Full post as published by Althouse on June 09, 2008 (boomark / email).