Other than Pazzo Books (newly relocated from Roslindale Square to Centre Street in West Roxbury) The Museum of Bad Art (MOBA), located in a secure bunker deep beneath the Dedham Community Theatre, is perhaps the only hip, edgy cultural venue anywhere west of JP's Milky Way.
My sons and I have visited MOBA dozens of times. It's hard not to visit it, actually, since you are required to walk through it on the way to the Dedham Community Theatre's men's room. But even if nature weren't calling, we drop by MOBA every time we're in the neighborhood, because the museum is just that, well, good.
The Museum Of Bad Art (MOBA) is a community-based, private institution dedicated to the collection, preservation, exhibition and celebration of bad art in all its forms and in all its glory.
MOBA was founded in the fall of 1993 and presented its first show in March 1994. The response was overwhelming. Since then, MOBA's collection and ambitions have grown exponentially.
Initially, MOBA was housed in the basement of a private home in Boston. This meager exhibition space limited the museum to being a regional cultural resource for the New England area.
As the only museum dedicated to bringing the worst of art to the widest of audiences we felt morally compelled to explore new, more creative ways of bringing this priceless collection of quality bad art to a global audience. Another Boston-area cultural institution, Dedham Community Theatre, generously allowed MOBA the use of their basement. The first permanent gallery is now conveniently located just outside the men’s room in a 1927 movie theatre. The ambience created such a convivial atmosphere, that when we went looking for a second location, the only place that was up to our quality standards was another theatre basement. The Somerville Theater in Davis Square, Somerville MA is now our second gallery.
MOBA celebrates and analyzes Bad Art, which curator Michael Frank, a musician and entertainer who also heads up the Regan Youth Baseball League in Jamaica Plain, defines as an artwork that was "created by someone who was seriously attempting to make an artistic statement -- one that has gone horribly awry in either its concept or execution." There is no room in MOBA for the work of young children, then. Nor is there room for paintings on black velvet and other commercially produced works, paint-by-numbers works, or paintings cranked out for tourists. No matter how bad or good this sort of thing may be, it wasn't intended to make an artistic statement.
This painting, however, was:
"Ronan the Pug," by Erin Rothgeb, MOBA catalog #333
A perfectly good word for the paintings on display at MOBA is "kitsch," which I once defined as "cultural products intended to be high quality, but seriously flawed in conception or taste." But wait -- in the 1990s, we were told constantly that we should laugh at kitsch. Does MOBA intend for museum visitors to laugh at its collection? Yes and no.
There are four possible reactions to MOBA's collection:
1) You're too highbrow to dig these paintings. You think they stink, and you can't understand why anyone would bother hanging them on a gallery wall. Stop reading this now, highbrow hipster. You're beyond help.
2) A straightforward but lowbrow appreciation of the artworks. Perhaps you think MOBA's watercolor painting of a queen holding what appears to be a chocolate chip cookie (but was probably intended to be some royal sigil) is pretty good. You're wrong -- it's not a good painting. But at least you haven't lost the capacity to feel, so bravo.
"Queen of the Chocolate Chip," by Christian, MOBA catalog #180
3) You sarcastically pretend to enjoy the paintings, because you're an anti-hip hipster. Sigh. People who pretend to enjoy kitsch as part of some lame 'anti-hip' put-on are to be pitied and even despised. I once claimed: "Their apparent hipness is nothing but the despair and rage of the emotionally disabled masquerading as coolness." You're a middlebrow, sir, and I invite you to stop reading now.
4) You feel an emotional connection with the paintings while simultaneously recognizing that it's not "good" art. Congratulations! You are an ironist in the best possible sense of the term. You're able to love something and enjoy its flaws -- laugh at them, even -- at the same time. Susan Sontag calls this "camp":
Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as 'a camp,' they're enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling.
NB: When the cast of John Waters' 1998 movie "Pecker" toast the "death of irony," at the end of that movie, they're toasting the death of anti-hip hipsterism, not camp. Sontag swiped the term "camp" from gay men, who later demanded that she give it back. The term "high-lowbrow," or "hi-lobrow," both of which I coined, are preferred.
I, for one, feel tenderly about MOBA. Which is why I'm excited to report the publication of "The Museum of Bad Art: Masterworks" (Ten Speed Press). Edited by Michael Frank and Louise Reilly Sacco (the museum's "permanent acting interim executive director"), the gorgeously produced book lovingly reproduces 70 works of bad art from the collection, along with Frank's perceptive and wittily understated reviews.
What does Frank have to say about "Ronan the Pug," which is not only slapdash but odd, since the dog seems to be looking up soulfully at the ceiling and crooning?
"The artist's affection for her dog far outstrips her artistic skill," he notes gently. "Paint is slapped on the canvas with random brushstrokes, creating matted, impossible fur. Done in such a hurry that the canine anatomy was not even considered, the artist still captures Ronan's playful sweetness. Or perhaps the pup has just lapped up all the spilled eggnog at a holiday party and is ready to attempt a clear tenor rendition of 'Danny Boy.'"
http://www.museumofbadart.org/collection/
courtesy: Joshua Glenn
