Museum of Bad Art

I was tempted to create a top-level post suggesting that they just call themselves "Museum" since "Of Bad Art" is redundant, but I figured the joke would get lost and I'd just get down-voted into oblivion.

I'm fairly creative, I can draw (at one time in my life I seriously wanted to be a comic book illustrator) and I'm a musician. I appreciate that art is subjective, often difficult to do well and that technical skill is not the only factor that matters.

But when I looked at their "collections" page my first thought was "How does this distinguish itself from the bulk of what goes on display in modern fine art exhibits?"

The serious question being posed is: "What makes this particular collection 'bad' but something like 'Voices of Fire' is so 'good' that it was worth charging the Canadian tax payers $1.8 million dollars in 1980s money to acquire for the National Gallery of Canada?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_Fire

> In 2014, it was reported that senior personnel at the National Gallery estimated that the current value of the painting is in excess of $40 million.

Sounds like the purchase worked out well for the taxpayers...

How does it help the tax payers to have a 40 million dollar asset on display?

Even if it has appreciated after adjusting for inflation (and I'm sure it has), what is the National Gallery's possession of that piece of canvas, oil and pigment doing to help the taxpayers with anything that concerns them in either 1989 or 2024?

In any event, this is a huge digression from the topic. I never meant to start a conversation about whether or not tax dollars should be used to purchase art, and what kind of art. The discussion is what makes art 'good' or 'bad'. And Voices of Fire was controversial in 1989 and still is ... because many Canadians are like "why do rich people pay money for this kind of stuff?"

If they sell it for that much

I didn't know this piece or the artist. Went through the few examples in Wikipedia of his art and it's almost all like this, minimalist blocks or stripes of color. Definitely not my thing.

Why does it matter? To me, because it's different for a masterful artist to purposefully create something minimalist (e.g. Picasso) when you know they could make something technically complex if they wished so, vs an artist for which there's no evidence they could create anything else but a few blobs of color.

In the second case, why are they not in the Bad Art Museum? Is it because of financial success of the art piece? Seems odd.

(I'm not trying to dictate anything universal or what others should think, it's just my own preferences and musings about art and artists).

> How does it help the tax payers to have a 40 million dollar asset on display?

Aside from the raw on-the-books investment value, valuable artworks a) bring in visitors and b) can be loaned in exchange for other works which will do even more of a).

I guess it would be an interesting experiment to randomly mix 'good' art into the bad art collection and vice versa and ask a load of critics and/or artists to comment on them.

I knew a guy who was selling his art online, he was making tongue-in-cheek, technically bad art but it was very deliberate as part of what he was trying to get at, he had a real artistic vision to his work.

His work got picked by MOBA and was made fun of, but they totally missed the point.

With a work of a size like "Voices of Fire", one has to consider the possibility that it hits differently in real life versus seeing a reproduction in a book or on the internet. For example, some people who were sceptical about the value of Mark Rothko’s paintings (which are fairly comparable in style) were won over once they saw the works in person. Or consider how Arvo Pärt, a composer who writes music in a style that could be labeled anti-modern, was moved almost to tears at seeing Anish Kapoor’s modern-art sculpture Marsyas.

Museums like the National Gallery of Canada like having in their collection pieces that might make people go wow, and tell other people who in turn might visit the museum.

Some time ago, I attended the memorial service for a skilled painter (not exactly a household name, though), and one of the stories told about him was that he visited the municipal museum, where there was a new exhibit of a newly acquired abstract expressionist painting (I believe by Mark Rothko), which just consisted of painted rectangles.

He studied the painting for some time, and then asked to see the director of the museum, to inform him that the painting was hung upside down! When asked why he would think that, he pointed out that wet paint does not flow upward…

So it is indeed possible for a connaisseur to distinguish interesting details in a painting like this.

I didn't know about "Voice of Fire" but it is the story makes it interesting.

By itself, the painting is not bad, kind of like a flag, just not particularly remarkable. But that it was bought for $1.8M with taxpayer money and the controversy it created is where its real value lies. With a name like "Voice of Fire", it is almost as if it was the plan. According to the Wikipedia article, it has been valued $40M in 2014, which, if real, would have made that $1.8M a worthy investment!

Excellent anecdote! Thanks for sharing.

Isn't this more evidence that it's arbitrary to decide something is "bad art" vs "good modern art" (of the pop/avant garde variety)?

Unless you've sat in the Rothko chapel or the Rothko room at the Tate, I don't think you can appreciate the profound solemnity of these things. You just can't experience these things through a photograph.