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Museum of Bad Art

museumofbadart.org

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I'm looking at the Unlikely Landscape collection (http://museumofbadart.org/unlikely-landscapes/) and realizing that I can't tell the difference between good and bad art.

I genuinely like some of them.

Some nice Bob Ross attempts.

Indeed, any of say Ludwig Kirchner paintings could've been added to this collection, and no one would spot a difference without being previously acquainted with his work and fame.

Some of it looks not unlike Rosseau, which is quite highly regarded, despite many considering them a joke at the time.

Like: https://pixels.com/featured/the-football-players-1908-by-hen...

> and realizing that I can't tell the difference between good and bad art

Use just ugly for that case.

After all, art may only be a matter of consensus.

I've been frequenting the MoBA for 8 years or so, since moving to town. We love the Somerville Theater, and can't wait 'till it can safely reopen. The MoBA has mostly been a place to stroll around with a beer/wine to kill time if you get there early. It's intentionally cheap, tacky and low brow. It changes very slowly.

I'd guess there's only about a 30% overlap between the onine collection and what I've seen displayed. There has often been weird art objects/sculptures besides the wall art.

Quite a surprise to see it on HN.

Sadly The museum of bad art had to move out of the Somerville theater a couple years ago. It was a fun diversion before the movies..

https://www.masslive.com/news/2019/04/the-museum-of-bad-art-...

Aw, didn't know that - that's a bummer!

MoBA is just one of the weird things I love about living in Somerville.

I used to browse this all the time, about ten years ago. Some of the descriptions had me crying in laughter.

I thought that this was going to be an appreciation for the interesting or unique qualities of "bad" art, but it's all just sarcastic comments demeaning or shaming the pieces.

Not saying this is better or worse, just disappointing to me because I really enjoy discussions about gleaning value from all art, good or bad.

I agree with you. I should have read the picture descriptions before posting the link. I see now that they are indeed quite snarky.

The pictures themselves seem to have been made with sincere intent, and the fact that many of them were found in thrift stores suggests that the people who donated them to the stores thought that they had value. I myself have several paintings on my walls by an old friend, now deceased. I don’t know if they are “good” or “bad,” but they have a lot of value to me.

Absolutely. Picasso's journey was to transition from stunning realism to a child-like surrealism in later years. In some respects he was trying to unlearn form but keep the aesthetic.

And to be honest some of these MOBA pictures do that too, they're actually not bad at all. It's just perhaps not intentional, but does that matter?

So to call it bad art, is going a bit far.

Creating something from nothing will always impress me more than particularly cutting snark.

“the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.”

― Anton Ego, 'Ratatouille'

Some of them are clearly people in the process of learning to draw. Like, face features are in wrong places, but it is not actually easy to get them right. Even with youtube, it takes several attempts till one learns. Others are just normal amateur drawings. Simple topics (fish) that are composed of simple shapes, the sort of thing you do to learn/train basics. Face that is good for amateur, except not smiling.

Landscapes that have an odd structure in it, but overall look alright, at least I liked them.

For any confused PNWers like myself, this different from Seattle's own "Official Bad Art Museum of Art", aka, OBAMA

https://www.caferacerseattle.com/official-bad-art-museum-of-...

Not all "bad" paintings on this site are the same kind of bad. Some of them look like really bad children paintings, like the man next to the car, but others are just kitsch-y compositions by somebody who mastered painting. For example, "Tropicanas" has anatomically correct people with unusual perspective and reflective lighting (which is quite difficult to paint).

Lol, looked through the collections briefly and I quite like a lot of this art!

As in some other art forms, bad != unenjoyable :)

If the drawing is enjoyable, why would one call it bad?

"Enjoyable" is a more specific word than "good/bad". "Bad" can refer to any dimension (of any object, not just art). Therefore, in cases where no context is defined, its meaning is governed by usage. In the context of art and art criticism, usage of "good/bad" typically refers to technical qualities and subjective execution, e.g. composition, color theory, emotion, communication, etc. Something can fail much of that and still manage to be enjoyable to a significant portion of consumers, though theoretically there would be an inverse relationship at the highest level. But such a state doesn't invalidate those metrics nor does it invalidate the experience of those consumers. Both are useful and valid in separate ways.

Composition is all about how to achieve enjoyable drawing. If you are enjoying, if it is not bothering you, then the composition is good by definition.

Same with color theory, it is a theory that is supposed to help you to achieve pleasant drawing.

Since there is more than one method to make something enjoyable, then something being enjoyable does not necessitate that all those methods were individually well executed. In fact, since enjoyability is so subjective and abstract and individual to each person, all "understood" methods of making something enjoyable could have failed, and a bunch of people could still find it enjoyable, and vice versa.

Ultimately though this is tangential. All I'm saying is that, while your average person is of course going to use "good/bad" basically synonymously with "enjoyable/unenjoyable", a professional, in my experience, uses the words "good/bad" more frequently to refer to more well defined specifics, for a broad range of professions. I only meant to explain why this website might use the term "bad" even though an individual HN user might find a lot of the art "good", and that it doesn't necessarily come down only to differences in personal taste.

(Though who knows? Maybe the website's curator just immediately thinks "I like that" or "I don't like that", and he leaves it at that when deciding what's "bad"!)

The same reason you can reasonably call a lot of food that tastes good 'bad'.

Only if they are unhealthy? I dont really see equivalent here.

I've enjoyed a lot of things that are bad (e.g. poorly constructed, or 'well' constructed but only in a way that traps one-dimensional aspects of human experience to the point of inducing addiction). Now I look upon such enjoyment with regret. Your point is relying on the messiness of the word definitions; what fun.

Seems kinda mean spirited. I guess if that’s what makes you happy?

If you want some music to go with this, you might want to look into the ‘outsider music’ genre. Why not start with the late legend himself, Daniel Johnston: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW2cmIIomac or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5hVsTXJ-yo

I'm not kidding, this quasi-genre is great.

‘Casiotone for the Painfully Alone’ is a proponent of the same kind, with electronic means: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3dUgPvkYnw

‘Songs in the key of Z’ is a splendid compilation: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8UVU8CLZUn25S2nu7bav... (the playlist apparently deviates from the tracklist, but includes my favorite that's not on all releases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v4karS-YaU)

Bingo Gazingo was unfortunately a late bloomer: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMEeCl_b3nYigZH0WOgxp... (dunno if the link works in the future, seems to be an automatic playlist and might be transient).

A particular hit with me is ‘You're Driving Me Mad’ by Alvin Dahn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeiaYPCANMc

Also the Museum of Bad Album Covers[0] recently featured here[1].

[0]http://www.zonicweb.net/badalbmcvrs/index.htm

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25383623

The theater this is in might be one of the best places to see a movie. I fondly remember the first night the Star Trek movie was shown. Every time a major character was introduced the crowd went wild. When they told us to turn our phones off some guy yelled "Silence your communicators". It had a really unique energy. Plus they serve beer.

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

- Theodore Roosevelt

When you buy a ticket to the MOBA gallery, you get a free movie, so it’s a pretty good deal. Hopefully it’ll be able to open again soon.

Ha. I assume this is tongue in cheek. (You actually have to buy a movie ticket. Once you're in, the gallery is simply a room in the basement past the restrooms)

"According to Marcia Tucker, The New Museum’s director, "‘Bad’ Painting” is an ironic title for good painting, which is characterized by deformation of the figure, a mixture of art-historical and non-art resources, and fantastic and irreverent content. In its disregard for accurate representation and its rejection of conventional attitudes about art, ‘bad’ painting is at once funny and moving, and often scandalous in its scorn for the standards of good taste" https://archive.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/5

I'd pay to go to a museum of bad art like this. For people who say that i could just go to any museum then, id say yes thats right, but these little jokes add value over a typical museum pretending bad art is good.

I came across a link to this site in a scanned copy of a book titled Weird Websites [1] at the Internet Archive.

The book was published in 2009, which seems a bit recent for a paper compilation of descriptions of websites. The museum itself is located in Massachusetts.

[1] https://archive.org/details/weirdwebsites0000mcle

I love MOBA. They were one town over from me, in Dedham, then I found it right down the street when I moved to Somerville.

The art is hilarious. But what really makes it great are the little blurbs near each piece. Exactly like the explanations you see in a real museum, but ... sublimely ridiculous. Great deadpan humor.

I teach a composition class at an art college and one of the common assignments is to find bad art and fix it utilizing the basic rules of composition. The Museum of Bad Art is an excellent resource for that assignment.

As seen in the Museum of Bad Site Design.

Did you mean this?

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/exhibitions/bad-and-ugly-web...

This reminds me of the time I went into a Melbourne boutique art shop and noticed an artist had painted a cow, with one of its legs backwards as if it were an emu leg.

The most common mistake with cow art is the teeth. Real cattle don't have any top front teeth.

I would have thought the first mistake with cow art would be the cow.

Fitzroy's got lot of good stuff.. And lots of stuff like this. And I love it all!

Hah yes it was Johnston St, Collingwood.

I'd personally add a lot of non-realistic USA video game character art, typically when there are lots of characters, to that museum. Examples: XBox avatars, Oculus avatars, Guitar Hero characters, Bitmoji characters (Snap).

I have no idea if there is some objective criteria that could distinguish why I find those characters so repulsive vs say Nintendo Mii or if it's just 100% subjective opinion.

Not specifically bad art, but the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne (https://www.artbrut.ch/en_GB) is quite amazing. The art is by people on the fringes of society “unfettered by cultural and/or social conditioning”

Came to the thread to recommend the same place. We thought it was a brilliant experience when we visited Lausanne - especially interesting to read each artist's backstory. One of my favourites galleries.

where are the kaws, jeff koons, and damien hirst sculptures?

some other shitty art topics i really enjoy are

- plop art

- zombie formalism

- XYZ art (http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/comment/41204/)

Can I throw Thomas Kincade and Jon McNaughton onto the pyre?

Or at least their work?

lol YES. those are like the conservative torchbearers of the propagandistic, decorative take

This is much better than Hitler's implementation of the idea.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/mar/13/degener...

Still better than a lot of contemporary art...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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