Fear of a Black Vacuum

[agoutirex]

So there's a certain term often used in outsider art, horror vacui or, literally, "fear of the vacuum." It refers to the almost compulsive need by some mentally unstable artists to completely fill every available inch of the canvas with detail; you can see examples of this phenomenom in the works of Adolf Wolfi and maybe later Louis Waine

Comments

[ff00ff]

I think we should be upset that the left doesn't have the intensity to attract these kinds of mental cases anymore. They universally seem to have far right politics, but I'm sure it couldn't have always been that way. Obviously a sane political ideology wouldn't rely on these people as a base, or even want them around, but I think the people who are mad in that particular way can see some kind of heat, some kind of lifestyle obsession in the right that isn't available in the left.

[brokenallbroken]

I know a couple people who have the conversational version of this. I think any sort of silence or empty space is space in which their brain can work. Obviously, We Can't Have This Sort Of Thing (they might realize they're making no sense), so they just fill it up with noise to obscure the signal.

[bailzzararco]

Just goes to show you, the less educated you are, the more likely you will support bad policies, like, being totally okay with rich people not paying for anything like the rest of us (worthless) grunts.

[seritaph]

I'm betting someone might have done some studies on this, but it's most likely buried at the back of a psychology journal, only to be unearthed by inquisitive thesis seekers twenty years from now.

[brentos_oh_yeah]

It's a very interesting point. People do need to observe patterns/symbols in everyday random situations. It's a survival trait we've developed through the ages. An example would be when we hear a noise behind us when we're in say some tall grass. In our minds we quickly imagine a tiger or something which fills a mental 'void' of something we didn't understand right off the bat. It turns out we're better off being overly cautious even when no threat/conspiracy exists. Michael Shermer writes about this quite often in Scientific American and Skeptic magazines. It's fuckin true!