Paul Clements is the author of five books on outsider art, cultural exclusion, and the politics of everyday life. His most recent, Art, Elitism, Authenticity and Liberty, was published by Routledge in 2024.
Across two decades of writing he has been drawn to the figures, places and practices that established culture tends to ignore or quietly absorb: the outsider artist, the underground scene, the prison classroom, the public sculpture nobody asked for. His work asks a stubborn question — does the cultural sector genuinely include the excluded, or does it perform inclusion while leaving the lines exactly where they were?
He has written at length on Charles Bukowski and the Beat movement, on participatory arts practice, on heterotopia and the politics of place, on post-communist Budapest, on astrology and modernity, and — once — on Steely Dan as a study in representational ambiguity. The thread that runs through it all is a refusal to take cultural legitimacy at face value.
A personal note
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Academic work
Paul has been affiliated with Goldsmiths, University of London. His full publication list — nineteen items spanning peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and reviews — is indexed in the Goldsmiths research repository. You can also browse the books or the articles and chapters here on this site, each linked through to the publisher.
Get in touch
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