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Museum of Bad Art

(museumofbadart.org)
205 points purkka | 2 comments | 18 Nov 24 00:09 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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Yawrehto ◴[18 Nov 24 14:04 UTC] No.42172345[source]▶
Honestly, most of them are still better than I could draw.
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gspencley ◴[18 Nov 24 15:03 UTC] No.42172928[source]▶
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

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1. PrismCrystal ◴[18 Nov 24 17:29 UTC] No.42174680[source]▶
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.

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2. squidsoup ◴[18 Nov 24 20:31 UTC] No.42176618[source]▶
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.