What is outsider art?

It's a question we've been asking a lot this month, in the weeks leading up to one of the genre's biggest events: the Outsider Art Fair . It's difficult enough to summarize the characteristically "raw" creativity of the American painters, photographers, printmakers, illustrators and multimedia pioneers who create on the periphery, often in isolation or as the result of a loosely unconventional upbringing.

It's even more difficult to pinpoint an overarching theme that connects the outsider artists across the globe.

Herv Perdriolle, a collector, curator and dealer who specializes in Indian contemporary art, attributes some of this blurriness to the fact that our conception of contemporary art itself is changing as artists from local cultures -- oftentimes outside the so-called mainstream market -- enter into mainstream consciousness.