At this point, both the elephants and their mahouts approach the blank canvas with an innocent eye. The canon of elephant art is still in its embryonic stages--there are no firm guidelines and few preconceptions as to what an elephant painting is supposed to look like. Moreover, very few elephants or mahouts have ever set foot inside an art museum and, at least for the moment, most remain art-world outsiders. Indeed, elephant painting is the ultimate Outsider Art, reinvigorating a moribund art scene and resolving the fin-de-si cle "crisis in painting" with a bold and uninhibited return to gestural abstraction.
