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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?"
> 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 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!
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.
My thoughts exactly! What makes a bad art piece anyway? While they might not have yet mastered the brush or the canvas, these artists are obviously passionate all the same, and isn't that what matters? Real bad art is soulless and as such would offer no value, be it entertainment or contemplative, when placed in a gallery. That is a true Mueseum Of Bad Art, and I suppose the curators know this. I thought some of these pieces were quite incredible, actually.
Entertainingly bad is different from simply bad in every(?) art.
So-bad-it's-good film isn't the worst film in every dimension—often it's competently- or even well-made in at least some ways. Films that are simply all-around bad, made with no amount of skill at the craft and insufficient effort, usually aren't entertaining and aren't the kind of thing anybody wants to watch. So-bad-it's-good is defined by being a kind of bad that one can still appreciate, even if part of the appreciation is of the ways in which it is bad.
There was a thread on here about bad songs the other day, and the kind of bad people meant wasn't, like, an untalented and under-practiced 9-year-old screeching out their original composition on a violin. Obviously that's worse than nearly anything, but nobody means that when they talk about something like "what are the worst songs?" A credible effort has to be put in for anyone to even care to think about it to shit on it.
I think it's still useful to call those categories "bad", even if they're not the most bad. Often the badness is what distinguishes them from the merely forgettable.
I definitely agree with you - it reminds me of an inverted bell curve, or the YouTube series "The Search For The Worst" - It is far better from a viewer's perspective to wholeheartedly and absolutely fail, then create something so mediocre and lacking in soul that it isn't worth a thought. I suppose the primary purpose of an art gallery, at least this one, is to entertain, and MOMA (Mueseum Of Mediocre Art in this case) was already taken [https://www.moma.org/]
I'm reminded also of the corporate art style [https://thebroadsideonline.com/17614/opinion/opinion-the-cor...] - every effort was taken to produce something so inoffensive and average that it could not possibly provoke any emotion in any demographic. Nobody would ever say that this is their favourite art style.
What's your favourite piece within the collections on the MOBA website?
The entire sports category is hard to beat. I think its tendency to provoke an attempt at depicting somewhat-realistic humans in action gives it an edge on some of the others, in terms of producing multidimensionally-baffling pieces.
Whatever the people who buy art and are influential say is bad. In general, very wealthy people and the dealers in their orbit determine which art is worthy and which art and artists will be forgotten.
My favourite painting of all time "The Escorial from a foot-hill of the Guadarrama mountains" by Lucas van Uden [https://data.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/id/image/media-4256550851] is quite a small painting that I'm sure most people have never heard of, hell, I'd never heard of it before I found it tucked politely in a corner of the Cambridge Fitzwilliam Museum, and I sure as hell don't know who Lucas van Uden is. Nevertheless, it is a remarkably beautiful painting and demonstrates true craft from the artist. I have no idea what a painting like this would cost, but I can't say it would be worth much compared to some of the other pieces in there. Your comment leads me to wonder what the incredibly wealthy would have to say about this painting's quality. It certainly feels worthy to me.
Just doing a quick search of auction prices for his work it looks like it can be had by fairly regular people. Mostly looks in the range of a few thousand euros for an oil on canvas landscape. Go get one!
I think it is quite simple to characterize MOBAs curation process. First, it has to be bad, in an ambition-vastly-exceeds-talent kind of way. Second (per MOBA rules) there is a price limit on each acquisition. It used to be $5, but may have been adjusted for inflation.
I guess some genres attract worse artists than others. Most in the "Oozing My Religion" and "In The Nood" categories are truly atrocious, while some from "MOBA Zoo" are actually not that bad (including my favourite - more because of the retroactively added title than because of the work itself - "You're a Mule, Dear")...
I have a 1944 World Almanac. It's incredibly detailed on World War Two - by my count, page 31 and 35-113 are mostly or totally devoted to it, in addition to the various bits on armies scattered throughout. Sometimes I look at it just to see what happened on that particular day (for instance: today, German forces landed in Leros, in the Aegean Sea, which was at the time held by the British, among many other events - and that just in 1943!) There are also some incredibly detailed war maps which I sometimes look at. At some point I should probably get around to uploading them, as they are absolutely amazing and I'd like to share it, but it's always near the bottom of my to-do list.
I have a copy of Churchill's memoirs of WWII and also read his memoirs of WWI. I always liked the maps in the books, as they somehow brought me a little closer to the time. They're another way of conveying information not only about what is being discussed, but also how the people going through it saw things and what they wrestled with conveying.
Maps made in the current day to accompany Churchill's text wouldn't have the same effect.
I think both of those are correct, although they appear to be the paperback, as the hardcover has the front illustration on the inside and is otherwise plain.
The electronic version does feel rather odd, though. It's much harder to open it to a random page and find something interesting (say, a list of refugee scholars who at the time had moved to the US, 561-63), which, for me at least, is the point. I could find the vast majority of the information, if not all of it, elsewhere with little effort, if I was so inclined. It's more in the discovery aspect of it (and the advertisements, which are often absolute gems, although less so than the 1909 edition, which included two awkwardly arranged vertical ads which had large text of 'Rupture' on the left and 'Your Lungs' on the right so it reads as 'Rupture Your Lungs', and also "Dr." Rupert Weils, who claimed to be able to cure cancer at home, using "radiatized fluid", which I think is radioactive water; by 1944 they were much less blatantly wrong or poorly arranged.)
Even if they didn't they'd be a hell of a lot cheaper. If, say, Microsoft can replace Satya Nadella with something that costs effectively nothing, is constantly available, and is even 95% as good, I'd think it would be a good deal for them.
I was able to get Perplexity to hallucinate very easily. Once it even cited the article where I got the prompt idea (I forget the URL, it was about teddy bears in space and published by the Signpost.) That was a while ago and I assume their model has improved, but hallucinations are still much more of a risk with AI than humans.
Also, how can Perplexity do things like interviews, tours, and other things that still require large amounts of human interaction?
There are a few categories here, ranked in rough order of how much I want them between and within categories, assuming infinite storage space and the ability to read the format that it's in.
Knowledge/Entertainment: A huge subset of LibGen/Anna's Archive. Wikipedia. Survival guides. Tons of websites, especially smaller ones that might not get preserved. I think the NYTimes will be fine, but random indie websites, not so much. Lots of music. Project Gutenberg and swaths of the Online Books Page listed items. Videos, and of course VLC (if it's not already downloaded). Various coding things (I, I assume unusually for HN, am not a programmer and don't know any programming languages, might as well learn to code.) Minecraft or a knockoff, on the off chance I somehow get bored.
Creating: LibreOffice (if it's not already installed). If it works offline, the Inspiral app, because spirographs make everything better. Gimp, Inkscape, Krita.
Personal: Records of as much of my digital life as I can get. So comments, posts, etc. I want to be able to look back at who I was.
Organization: Calibre (again, assuming it's not installed). Obsidian.
I don't think so. It might get smaller and nerdier, yeah. But I'm on Mastodon, and there's a strong anti-AI and app (not in principle, I believe, but in practice; they tend to be more privacy-invasive than an equivalent website, whichh is a major part of their appeal for companies) bias. I don't think indie/small/whatever-you-want-to-call-them websites are hopping aboard the bandwagon either.
I could see the feel changing and it becoming less "oh, of course you've visited a website" thing and somewhat more of a conscious choice, but vanishing? No.
In terms of services the government provides, overall quality of life, etc, I'm not sure how much/if the US is ahead of, say, Botswana. I know that we're basically the wealthiest of the unhealthy (excluding tiny oil states like Bahrain), and it wouldn't shock me if you could describe the US as the wealthiest country in the world with a third world standard of living, especially as the lines between first and third world get blurry.
I don't have the data or time offhand, but if you're interested, have a look at ourworldindata.org; they probably have many relevant things.
Because the undecided voter, or the one who switches party affiliations, is practically extinct. If in the past about 10 percent of voters were tossups, or even just not 100 percent confident, today a much smaller portion are. So as party lines grow firmer, margins grow narrower.
reply