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Museum of Bad Art

(museumofbadart.org)
205 points purkka | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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Yawrehto ◴[] No.42172345[source]
Honestly, most of them are still better than I could draw.
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gspencley ◴[] 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. GuB-42 ◴[] No.42175038[source]
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!