Word: art
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...might think, then, that any piece of junk you come across could qualify as bad art. But MOBA won’t settle for just any third-rate canvas; only 10 to 20 percent of submissions are “bad enough” for the MOBA board and there are rigorous rules dictating what will be considered. No works by children, no commercially-produced paintings, and no tacky tourist art are permitted. Nor are kitschy paintings on black velvet, paint-by-numbers, or latch-hook rugs accepted. “Any of the aforementioned may be compelling...
Talent or virtuosity does not preclude admission into the pantheon of bad art, nor does artistic ineptitude alone ensure it. The works that are included vary in style and medium, but most share certain characteristics. First off, bad art tends to be figurative. Garish, unnatural colors seem to be a prerequisite. And much bad art just contains bad subject matter (take, for instance, a bovine form precipitating down what appears to be a waterfall in “Suicide,” or George Seurat relieving himself in the pointillist-style “Sunday on the Pot with George...
Many of the works on display in the MOBA galleries are accompanied by tongue-in-cheek wall labels that cite a laundry list of famous artists as possible influences, mocking art historical commentary, and criticism. One label, for instance, compares “The Lady with Big Pants” to Goya’s “Nude Maja,” while another pretends that a painting entitled “The Last Dance” may be, “an atypical, late work by iconoclastic French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec...
...perhaps the biggest joke of all is that, despite the “bad” tendencies that run through many of the works in the collection, the badness isn’t always apparent. Try as the curators may to establish guidelines and standards for what makes bad art, I’m not sure that it’s all bad, or frankly, all that different from what you might see at a regular art museum. Compare “Out of Joint,” an expressionistic portrait of a seated mustachioed man set against a mustard...
...critique is one of the key influences in the artistic developments of the late 20th century. Is MOBA, then, with its humorous take on the way in which museums assign aesthetic value, participating in this same discourse of institutional critique? What does the very fact of creating a bad art museum say about the over-intellectualized realm of contemporary art? And if MOBA is more interesting for its idea than for the actual works on display, can it be regarded as a piece of conceptual art itself? Is the Museum of Bad Art, in short, a work of good art...