Navratil referred to the residents as “patients” and paid scant attention to the valuation of their art beyond the encouragement and praise of the staff. All the same, he was in the habit of publicizing the hospital and the artwork by giving it away to interested artists like Dubuffet. In 1970 Navratil and Otto Mauer organized the first exhibition of work by Gugging artists, showing the work of more than 20 patients at a gallery in Vienna.

The emphasis changed after Navratil retired in 1986 and Feilacher took over. Feilacher doesn’t accept the view that certain kinds of illness make for higher degrees of creativity and has set his mind to shifting the emphasis away from the artists’ pathology and toward their art — including, no less important, its commercial viability. The shift began with renaming the residence the House of Artists and replacing “patients” with “artists.” Zambo, the collector, supports this approach: His relationship to the residents’ works is strictly — some might say ruthlessly — utilitarian, almost as if the house was a spawning ground for potential new Outsider stars. “Of course they are ‘sick,’” he says briskly, “but it has nothing to do with their talent.”

To the average viewer, the work of Outsider Artists may look infantile, incoherent, impenetrably private, or boringly repetitive — the sort of ham-handed production that’s taped on a refrigerator by a doting mother. Although Outsider Art still frequently meets with distrust or derision, this idiosyncratic genre — which is separate and distinct from folk, naive, and Sunday-artist productions — has a long and respectable lineage and is increasingly selling for high prices in Europe and the U.S. Feilacher turns a tad contemptuous on the subject of American collectors: He calls New York a “trash pot” and pronounces its annual Outsider Art Fair “terrible.” Which didn’t stop Katschnig from bringing the work of some Gugging artists (including Vondal, Schützenhöfer, Leonhard Fink, and Laila Bachtiar) to the fair last year, fetching what she considers to be disappointing sales totaling $3,000.

Perhaps the most direct way of assessing the value of Gugging’s mission is to go straight to the source: Is Günter Schützenhöfer, say, who survived indifferent and abusive behavior in various institutions before Feilacher rescued him for the sake of his art, happy? To judge by his high-spirited, unconstricted drawings and his gentle smile — which breaks across his face with a heartrending radiance — I can only conclude that he is.

"Mad Skills" originally appeared in the May/June 2008 issue of Culture+Travel. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Culture+Travel's May/June 2008 Table of Contents.