[ferguu_]

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.

[vundercind]

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.

[ferguu_]

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?

[vundercind]

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.

[nemo44x]

> What makes a bad art piece anyway?

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.

[ferguu_]

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.

[nemo44x]

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!

[geophile]

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.

[iainmerrick]

You could satisfy those constraints with an expensive traditional museum piece by a) asserting that it is bad, and b) stealing it.