I would rather think of Howard Finster as a great southern artist or a great Christian artist than as a folk or outsider artist. I suspect that what the secular art world found so curious and remarkable about Finster's work was his relentless evangelical didacticism coupled with his unabashed commercial self-promotion. For Finster, though, these were not contradictory impulses. They were part and parcel of who he was, and the southern evangelical tradition of which he is a part. He did not sell out, and he was not an aberration. His assertion that his art was "sacred" was absolutely sincere, in spite of what some might think of his using an El-Marko to write "$35" in bold print on the back of a piece.