MOBA – The Museum Of Bad Art. It’s in Boston. This one, not this one.
The tagline is “Art too bad to be ignored”, and there’s certainly some very bad art on offer there, but surely beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that, and this is all subjective?
I think that we could unanimously agree that a lot of it is bad, but let’s just look at the way the museum (website) is put together, and you can see that they want to celebrate just how rubbish stuff is in a humorous was, rather than try to crucify the artists.
The pieces in the MOBA collection range from the work of talented artists that have gone awry to works of exuberant, although crude, execution by artists barely in control of the brush. What they all have in common is a special quality that sets them apart in one way or another from the merely incompetent.
And with collections including “Poor traits”, “Oozing my religion” and “Unlikely landscapes” – there’s plenty to enjoy endure.
I have zero artistic talent. That ability passed over my generation without troubling me at all. But I think that I’m aware of my lack of expertise, and so I choose not to push myself in that direction.
Not so these “artists”. But there are exceptions. This is my favourite painting:
Not because of the rather odd Bassett Hound, but also, the artist’s own comment on his work:
In the note accompanying his donation, Mr. Roots wrote, “…I was happy with the way the barn turned out. It was when I started animals and people that [I realized] I was having problems with proportions…”
The blurb provided by the Museum for each image is also well worth a look.