Museum of Bad Art

I dislike it. Ostensibly this is taking on art museum snobbery, but many of these works are by amateurs and were literally pulled out the trash. It feels like an embittered teacher making fun of a kid, while the class snickers at the spectacle of public humiliation.

To each of the artists: congratulations for having the courage to trust in your imagination. I hope that others have engaged with your works with greater generosity.

EDIT: There’s a missed opportunity here for a critic to participate in the exhibition by praising the works sincerely. (If museum goers can detect sarcasm then the critique has failed.) That would be more fun and it wouldn’t even be hard since the works have already set expectations low.

Yeah, it seems unkind. What is the purpose here? To teach about art, using art that maybe was someone's learning attempt seems like a huge mistake (and is likely to scare away students). If you aren't teaching, why talk about bad art at all?

Here's a delightful and illuminating 6 minute video which explains some of the purpose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB6UhGbyXfE

Punchline at the end: "We don't say negative things about the art or the artist. Our stated goal is to collect, exhibit, and celebrate this art that would be appreciated nowhere else."

I watched the video and I don't see how cutting commentary like otteromkram pointed out here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42168503#42173585 aligns with their intent to not say anything negative about the artist:

> MOBA curators believe this painting, as well as others in the collection, may have been affected by the artists' never having actually seen a naked woman.

Or how this, with regards to https://museumofbadart.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/photo-... doesn't say anything negative about the art:

> The model, whose red hair matches the wall color almost perfectly, leans to her right in a pose designed to help the artist avoid the difficulty of portraying her hands. In doing so, she seems to have dislocated her left hip.

This isn't some cubist work where the body distortion was deliberate, it's just a painting by an artist that hasn't mastered realistic anatomical perspective.

I admire the sentiment in the video, and I can appreciate how it's difficult to live up to it. I wish they would go through the commentary on their site and make it more uplifting — I think that would make their creative endeavor of curation more compelling.

> and make it more uplifting

And end up with the E954 praising of children and participation awards?

If we grow through adversity, what happens when we edit all adversity out of our realities?