Museum of Bad Art

I am fortunate to live reasonably near the Museum of Bad Art, which is in the basement of a movie theatre (art house, of course) in Dedham, Massachusetts. I love that it exists, that it raises questions, that it is humorous and quirky and never fails to make me smile.

The art comes from thrift stores, yard sales, donations (sometimes by the artist) and other such places. It's sometimes funny, sometimes creepy, generally weird. There is also something serious and dear about it.

"The pieces in the MOBA collection range from the work of talented artists that have gone awry to works of exuberant, although crude, execution by artists barely in control of the brush. What they all have in common is a special quality that sets them apart in one way or another from the merely incompetent."  (from the MOBA website).

Yup, weird.

The comments posted with each picture are amusing. Some are written by the person who donated it, some by the MOBA curators. For the above: "No longer able to tolerate the incessant barking, Charlie the chipmunk uses a Band-Aid to tape Sheba the Sheepdog's mouth shut before posing with her on the picnic table." (Doesn't that look more like a monkey-dog than a chipmunk?)

Of course the term bad art raises eyebrows. There's a New York Times article about MOBA that discusses that issue  (read it here). I love outsider art, which I could possibly distinguish from bad art, but am not going to go into parsing all of that here, now. It's not relevant.

For years I have toyed with the idea of creating something like the MOBA in the Catskills--I think it would be great fun and I see plenty of good bad art at the auctions I frequent. I even emailed MOBA to see if they'd be interested in having a Catskills outpost. Alas, I have not yet heard from them. Of course I can go ahead and do something on my own. Maybe make a little space in the store for quirky art?

All pictures from the MOBA collection.