It's worse than that, they're using some lame WordPress plugin called wp-content-copy-protector to hijack shorcuts to copy or view source as well. Really hostile and yet ridiculously easy to bypass.
> show_wpcp_message('You are not allowed to copy content or view source');
Yes I am, you poor deluded soul, yes I am. There's absolutely no way for you to control what happens to the content once it has left your server. And using such tricks is a huge red flag about the professionalism of the site makers.
MOBA is the world’s only museum dedicated to the collection, exhibition, and celebration of art that would not be welcomed to any traditional art museum. Our collection includes sincere art in which something has gone wrong in a way that results in a compelling, interesting image. Location: inside the Dorchester Brewing Co, 1250 Massachusetts Ave, Boston MA 02125. Hours: Sunday Monday 11:30-9, Tuesday through Thursday 11:30-10, Friday and Saturday 11:30-11. Winter 2024/25 Hours:
Wednesday, Nov 27, close 6pm; Thanksgiving, Nov 28, CLOSED.
Christmas Eve, Dec 24, close 6pm; Christmas, Dec 25, CLOSED.
New Year’s Eve, Dec 31, open until midnight; New Year’s Day, Jan 1, open 11:30 to 10pm
January and February, every Monday, open at 3pm.
Admission: free
Dorchester Brewing Company
DBco is Boston’s hottest Tap Room filled with fresh craft beer. It’s right on Mass Ave in Dorchester! Admission to MOBA is free only because DBco allows (even encourages) MOBA to adorn the walls in the taproom, game room, the stairwell, even on the outside of the elevator shaft and a walk-in refrigerator. While you’re there, try house-made craft beers, cider, seltzer, and wine. Here’s the Taproom menu. Enjoy lunch or dinner from their onsite food partner, M&M Barbecue.
DBco has a Rooftop Greenhouse and outdoor roof deck with views of the Boston skyline; Game Room with skeeball, pinball, arcade games, pop-a-shot, and tabletop shuffleboard; and public events like Yappy Hour, Trivia Contests, Crafting Sessions, and more. Event Calendar here.
Meet the MOBA Staff
WSBE RI PBS (Rhode Island Public Broadcast System) came all the way to Boston to learn about the Museum Of Bad Art. The result is a 7-minute video introducing MOBA’s people, history, and art. It was broadcast on their weekly show, Art, Inc. and is now available on YouTube. If you want to meet Curator-in-chief Michael Frank and Permanent Interim Acting Executive Director Louise Reilly Sacco, aka Mike and Louise, take a look here.
Among all the other bullshit, this is a pretty circular definition:
MOBA is the world’s only museum dedicated to the collection, exhibition, and celebration of art that would not be welcomed to any traditional art museum
Bullshit - plenty of traditional art museums have "outsider art" exhibitions.
That term is arguably still a bit snobby, but it's better than just calling it "bad art" because a lot of it isn't actually bad at all!
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 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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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 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")...
Yup, they moved back when Somerville Theater did the most recent renovations I think. I kind of miss going to the bathroom down there and seeing the strange art while wandering.
This philosophy matches up with how I curate my music collection, which has brought me a great deal of joy even if it means no one will give me the aux cable at parties
I went to the bad art museum in iceland and it was quite something to see in person. As you turn each corner, new dimensions of weird and shock emerge. Some was just kind of silly, and some was accidentally horrifying in an uncanny valley sort of way. Some were mental illness on display. I left with some very mixed feelings.. the ha-ha with the oh-no, and the oh-my! Definitely glad to have seen it. Online photos do not do the awfulness justice.
I actually went to the penis museum 5 years ago! It was... maybe not the best thing. It's not exactly clear in a lot of the marketing materials, and even once you arrive, that it's just a single room behind the front desk. It felt a lot more like a road side attraction than anything else. The gift shop in the front was a similar size to the museum in the back.
To be fair my expectations of a penis museum weren't THAT high, and it was still funny to go and get pictures! But that's about all the experience really is.
The MOBA was always fun to visit after seeing a movie at Somerville Theatre. Recently I found myself wishing I were back in Somerville, because they had an anniversary showing of Hackers there in September, with special guest Renoly Santiago ("Phantom Phreak").
The Athlete in the Sports Section [0] is glorious:
> Crayon and pencil on canvas, 40" x 30"
> Rescued from trash in Boston, MA
> The discus thrower's pink mini toga, wing tip shoes, and white socks define athletic sartorial splendor. This is among the largest crayon on canvas pieces one can ever hope to see.
I flipped through the "unseen forces" section and so far about half of them aren't actually bad. For example Monochrome 006 (supposedly inspired by Schoenberg) would IMO fit right in at MOMA and was actually kind of cool. Likewise, Inside The Egg, Twins In Utero, and Spewing Marshmallows were both really interesting. Some of these are actually goofy doodles, but it's a shame to dismiss everything that isn't a conventional oil painting as "bad". I say this as someone who doesn't really enjoy or appreciate modern art (or modern music like Schoenberg for that matter).
I see the same problem in other sections too. A New Day looks like a child's doodle. But Greenscape and Burning Bush are interesting. They both look like they were painted by big Bob Ross fans. Amateur, sure. But hardly "bad art" to the point of being in a museum of bad art. Or maybe they're much worse in person?
In the landscapes section there are some that look as if the author was Dalí.
Now, Dalí is divisive and many hate his work. But when you add Dalí-like art to your "bad art" gallery you're making a bold & controversial statement...
yeah I also have a gallery of 'bad art', in my home entryway. I have about 25 pieces I've collected from the side of the road when students move out. Mostly half-finished canvases, portraits of beer cans.
Consider the possibility that the artists behind these pieces were not trolling, but genuinely trying to express something, or craft something beautiful. Mocking their failures is a little bit liking making fun of a small child’s fingerpainting.
I completely agree that this stuff is ugly, much of it atrociously ugly. But it’s likely the artists knew no better, or at least could do no better. It’s also ugly to mock others — and we do know better, and we can do better.
That's my impression as well. Very few of the pieces look like trolling. They look more like when an enthusiastic relative tells you they've started art classes and they show you what they've done so far...
You know, that aunt that has started doing watercolors and asks for your honest opinion.
I was just thinking that when an animal paints, we sometimes see at least a little something worth seeing in there. They have no scholarly craft but still there is something that came out of them. It seems that the same should also be true for humans.
Some of these look similar to stuff I've seen in galleries purporting to display good modern art.
There's an asymmetry going on here... I think making bad art at this level is very easy. Most of it looks like things created by children (or young people) who are not very talented or still lack direction and practice. Perspective errors, hiding body parts that are difficult to draw for novices, uninteresting composition,
garish colors... (making things more confusing: each of these "flaws" can be done on purpose by a decent artist, to make a statement).
I wonder what qualifies for inclusion in MOBA. Creating good art is difficult, but creating bad art is trivial.
Or maybe it's bad art that is noteworthy for external reasons, like Ecce Homo?
It's like the label is guiding you about how you should think about the piece.
Many of these, had they been in a modern art gallery and labeled something like "man despairing at the enormity of the cosmos" would have gone unnoticed or even praised.
153 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] thread[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Bad_Art#Collection_h...
https://arthur.io/art/unknown/lucy-in-the-field-with-flowers
Museum of Bad Art - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26031441 - Feb 2021 (57 comments)
Please don't break the web.
Yes I am, you poor deluded soul, yes I am. There's absolutely no way for you to control what happens to the content once it has left your server. And using such tricks is a huge red flag about the professionalism of the site makers.
The Museum Of Bad Art, MOBA
MOBA is the world’s only museum dedicated to the collection, exhibition, and celebration of art that would not be welcomed to any traditional art museum. Our collection includes sincere art in which something has gone wrong in a way that results in a compelling, interesting image. Location: inside the Dorchester Brewing Co, 1250 Massachusetts Ave, Boston MA 02125. Hours: Sunday Monday 11:30-9, Tuesday through Thursday 11:30-10, Friday and Saturday 11:30-11. Winter 2024/25 Hours:
Wednesday, Nov 27, close 6pm; Thanksgiving, Nov 28, CLOSED.
Christmas Eve, Dec 24, close 6pm; Christmas, Dec 25, CLOSED.
New Year’s Eve, Dec 31, open until midnight; New Year’s Day, Jan 1, open 11:30 to 10pm
January and February, every Monday, open at 3pm.
Admission: free
Dorchester Brewing Company
DBco is Boston’s hottest Tap Room filled with fresh craft beer. It’s right on Mass Ave in Dorchester! Admission to MOBA is free only because DBco allows (even encourages) MOBA to adorn the walls in the taproom, game room, the stairwell, even on the outside of the elevator shaft and a walk-in refrigerator. While you’re there, try house-made craft beers, cider, seltzer, and wine. Here’s the Taproom menu. Enjoy lunch or dinner from their onsite food partner, M&M Barbecue. DBco has a Rooftop Greenhouse and outdoor roof deck with views of the Boston skyline; Game Room with skeeball, pinball, arcade games, pop-a-shot, and tabletop shuffleboard; and public events like Yappy Hour, Trivia Contests, Crafting Sessions, and more. Event Calendar here.
Meet the MOBA Staff
WSBE RI PBS (Rhode Island Public Broadcast System) came all the way to Boston to learn about the Museum Of Bad Art. The result is a 7-minute video introducing MOBA’s people, history, and art. It was broadcast on their weekly show, Art, Inc. and is now available on YouTube. If you want to meet Curator-in-chief Michael Frank and Permanent Interim Acting Executive Director Louise Reilly Sacco, aka Mike and Louise, take a look here.
MOBA is the world’s only museum dedicated to the collection, exhibition, and celebration of art that would not be welcomed to any traditional art museum
Bullshit - plenty of traditional art museums have "outsider art" exhibitions.
That term is arguably still a bit snobby, but it's better than just calling it "bad art" because a lot of it isn't actually bad at all!
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'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?
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.
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
Sounds like the purchase worked out well for the taxpayers...
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?"
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).
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).
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.
Isn't this more evidence that it's arbitrary to decide something is "bad art" vs "good modern art" (of the pop/avant garde variety)?
His work got picked by MOBA and was made fun of, but they totally missed the point.
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.
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!
To be fair my expectations of a penis museum weren't THAT high, and it was still funny to go and get pictures! But that's about all the experience really is.
> Crayon and pencil on canvas, 40" x 30"
> Rescued from trash in Boston, MA
> The discus thrower's pink mini toga, wing tip shoes, and white socks define athletic sartorial splendor. This is among the largest crayon on canvas pieces one can ever hope to see.
0: https://museumofbadart.org/sports/
I see the same problem in other sections too. A New Day looks like a child's doodle. But Greenscape and Burning Bush are interesting. They both look like they were painted by big Bob Ross fans. Amateur, sure. But hardly "bad art" to the point of being in a museum of bad art. Or maybe they're much worse in person?
Now, Dalí is divisive and many hate his work. But when you add Dalí-like art to your "bad art" gallery you're making a bold & controversial statement...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backronym
Just bad, unclear, convoluted explanations.
Thankfully they provide a lot of examples - they should probably just skip to those and you’d be better off for it.
I completely agree that this stuff is ugly, much of it atrociously ugly. But it’s likely the artists knew no better, or at least could do no better. It’s also ugly to mock others — and we do know better, and we can do better.
You know, that aunt that has started doing watercolors and asks for your honest opinion.
There's an asymmetry going on here... I think making bad art at this level is very easy. Most of it looks like things created by children (or young people) who are not very talented or still lack direction and practice. Perspective errors, hiding body parts that are difficult to draw for novices, uninteresting composition, garish colors... (making things more confusing: each of these "flaws" can be done on purpose by a decent artist, to make a statement).
I wonder what qualifies for inclusion in MOBA. Creating good art is difficult, but creating bad art is trivial.
Or maybe it's bad art that is noteworthy for external reasons, like Ecce Homo?
I don't understand the need to label it as bad. It's just stupid.
Lots of museums of amateur art exist around the world and don't just shit all over the artists.
Fuck you MOBA.
Many of these, had they been in a modern art gallery and labeled something like "man despairing at the enormity of the cosmos" would have gone unnoticed or even praised.