… is up and running, and we’ve been discussing, among other things, bad art.
Even as we carried on our discussion yesterday, this New York Times piece on the subject — with lavish illustrations — appeared.
Here are some of the ways the article describes bad art:
anonymous, strange, clumsy and cheap
created in all seriousness, but clearly something has gone wrong, either in the execution or in the concept
off-kilter paintings (and psyches)
disturbing, yet I can’t seem to look away
Consider one of the paintings, An I for an Eye.
It’s not bad merely because it’s badly painted, its colors flat and loud and inexpressive, its body/tree in awkward juxtaposition with a trunk. It’s bad because it combines a colossal desire to convey something the painter considers a profound truth, with a miniscule ability in fact to convey it.
Again, this is partly because the painter lacks craft. There’s a disconnect between the painter’s thoughts and his hand.
But it is more importantly because the painter lacks insight, clarity, and subtlety in relation to the revelation about the human condition that he wishes to press upon us. His painting fairly pants with philosophical fervor; it wants to provoke an epiphany about life in its viewer. Yet its painstaking, painfully schematic, metaphor, its insulting intellectual dullness — we grow as trees grow, rooted in the soil of the earth, aspiring toward the sun of happiness, and yet in our blindness and shame we produce the fruit of sorrow — communicates only the vapid, overweening self-confidence of its creator.
I suppose this is what makes it good bad art — the intensity of conviction on the part of the painter.
All bad poetry is sincere, said Wilde.
Good bad art is intensely sincere.
September 3rd, 2010 at 10:26PM
You might find this interesting:
http://www.futilitycloset.com/2010/08/29/the-emperors-new-pose/