Saturday, September 23, 2017

The Encyclopedic Palace at the Outsider Art Fair



Marino Auriti's Encyclopedic Palace will be in Paris at the Outsider Art Fair, October 19-22, 2017. I doubt he would have had any use for the label "outsider"; but he would have loved the architecture of Paris. The backstory of my grandfather's great work can be read here in my 2012 post about the Venice Biennale. 

He'd have been amazed to read that his was "an eccentric if touching case of postwar America's imperial mentality (i.e. an encyclopedic palace of the world in the capital of the United States)" as whoever wrote this on Wikipedia put it. As someone who fled the Fascists and lost his homeland, he'd have found this baffling. And likely not "touching," since he wasn't someone who dealt in condescension.