But is it outsider art? A prominent painter flunks a purity test.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Joe Coleman

IT MAY BE impossible to define outsider art adequately, but I'll try. It is eccentric, engaging, and often apocalyptic. It stands outside the standard schools and movements, and it is produced by artists who are usually self-taught and often judged insane. It includes some of the most compelling, disturbing, and/or simply strange painting, sculpture, and even literature and music being produced today. Like pornography, I know it when I see it; and like pornography, its boundaries are hard to locate.

Joe Coleman has just hit one of those boundaries. Whatever outsider art might be, Coleman is one of its biggest stars, creating vivid paintings of riots, demons, serial killers, and sideshow geeks, all rendered in an instantly recognizable style. His 1996 painting Faith does not merely include a scantily clad woman with a crucifix around her neck saying, "Come here, you bad boy," above the caption, "Mommy says: Come visit me in Heaven." It puts her in a tableaux that also includes internal organs, Hindu deities, Richard Speck, and--surrounded by all that and much else--Coleman himself, his skull exposed, an armless clock in the center of his face. To the extent that such labels mean anything, it's not hard to see why Coleman is usually branded an outsider artist.

Yet New York's annual Outsider Art Fair, which flirted with barring Coleman's paintings in 2002, decided not to include him when it reopened its doors from January 23 to 26 this year. The chief problem, says co-director Caroline Kerrigan, is that Coleman has been to art school, thus removing him from the ranks of the self-taught. "This is a fair for outsider artists," she says. "We feel his art would be more appropriate in a contemporary fair." Coleman claims that money is the real issue: When the organizers excluded him, he asserts, they described him as "too aware of the whole business process of selling" his work. "They seem to want to promote an art in which they're dealing with people who are either emotionally or physically incapable of protecting themselves;' he complains. "Or dead."

It does seem strange that the Outsider Art Fair, which has shown Coleman's work since 1997, would choose to exclude him now. It's not as though it only just learned that the painter attended the New York School of the Visual Arts, and it's not as though he's the only artist at the fair with such a background. One, Alex Grey, actually teaches art. Coleman, meanwhile, was tossed out of school and happy...