Outsider art collection, part one

I’m not really interested in traditional art, I’ll happily leave that stuff to my former girlfriend. I’m generally only interested in the stuff produced by people near the bottom of the social totem pole. When you say that, people want to imagine some obese gay brown woman in a wheelchair who works for a Silicon Valley tech company, but that’s not the bottom of the social totem pole to me. To me the bottom of the social totem pole is an autistic racist white teenage incel addicted to Benadryl who smears feces on the walls of his bedroom.

I have shown off some of the Pretty Princess Point themes before. This is art, but people don’t recognize it as such because they don’t realize what art is: Art is expression of the human condition. AI can’t generate art, because it does not experience the human condition. At best it can generate pretty pictures, but that’s not art.

Every “art style” is just a case of people gradually deciding on rules of the game and coloring within the lines set by those rules. And so a meme like Pretty Princess Points becomes an art style, a playing field with subtle or explicitly defined rules, with people borrowing elements from each other and giving them their own interpretation.

But today I want to show off some of my favorite stuff, art produced by people who use obscure drugs. Art inspired by classical psychedelics is generally boring to me, we know what they do for the majority of people who take them. I want to showcase some stuff today produced by people consuming weirder substances.

Salvia Divinorum inspired art.

And here, a drawing of a mechanical man:

Salvia Divinorum can leave you feeling very dissociated from your body. I felt like my own body was an exhibition piece at a modern art museum once while chewing fresh leaves.

Someone also posted Salvia inspired art on the dextrodoomers subreddit:

Now it’s time to get to the really interesting stuff: Cholinergic antagonists. I don’t know why, perhaps the combination of youth and strange drugs, but teenagers who use DPH make the most interesting art. This stuff seems to be the closest thing there is to experiencing death. They’re exploring the most outer edges of the human condition. And they have a ridiculously good absurdist sense of humor. To take DPH seems to be seeking enlightenment through the left-handed path, like the Aghori of India.

One of my favorites:

There is this self-portrait done on DPH by someone who tried it for the first time and appears to have no desire to revisit the experience:

Then there’s this meme I need to share. It’s extremely niche, I think there may be a few hundred people at most worldwide who get the joke:

Reddit tolerates the drug communities, through which other elements of outsider culture, like far-right 4chan culture, then seeps in again.

There’s also this young Reddit user, whose DPH art is truly inspired.

This work appears inspired by the Hatman, the entity people report most often after taking DPH:

And then here’s one of my favorite by this artist:

I want you to take a moment and just compare the Salvia inspired art to the DPH inspired art. Pay attention to the difference in colors used. DPH users go for red and black, or for sepia colours that seem reminiscent of an old person’s house. But Salvia users go for colours that are childish and cartoon like.

Benadryl now begins to inspire a lot of teenage goth music. There is for example the witch house/trap artist Semetary, who sings about mixing Robotussin (DXM, a dissociative like Ketamine) and Benadryl in his Monster (an energy drink). And simultaneously, the culture of the elderly begins to influence the culture of the teenagers who take this drug. As an example, some listen to The Caretaker while high on Benadryl. The Caretaker is a project that remixes music elderly with Alzheimer’s would have listened to while young, to simulate the experience of having Alzheimer’s.

And you shouldn’t live under illusions about these people. Just because they’re mentally ill and addicted to Benadryl doesn’t mean they’re good people. They’re generally not saints. Plenty are self-absorbed, delusional, narcissistic and stubborn. But just as Polanski is a good director despite raping a child, the Benadryl users tend to have a gift regardless of whether they’re pleasant people to be around.

One more by the Benadryl user above:

This has to be my absolute favorite of everything I’ve collected in this post today. It’s a colourful eerie spectacle, painted on what seem to be old pages from a book.

This is self-expression at its most extreme. It is the mind trying its best, to immortalize a sensation, to capture the madness.

To see it makes me intensely happy.

I’m currently looking to buy stuff like this, to make a collection of it. Ideally I’d have a collection of some really interesting works, that I would show as part of an exhibition in Rotterdam, but that’s just a hopeful dream at this point.

If anyone knows any pieces like this that are for sale, please let me know. Note: I’m only interested in buying physical art, nothing drawn on a computer or produced with AI.