Museum of Bad Art

http://www.museumofbadart.org/index.html


I found this wonderful website which is an online exhibition of bad art. "The preservation of this unique body of artwork is our highest priority, except during the occasional exhibition in a local car wash." The real museum is located in the basement of an old movie theater, outside the bathrooms, near Boston, MA.

It looks like there are 32 pieces in the digitized collection, but it seems that this is not the complete collection of the museum. So I imagine the online gallery are favorites or highlights. There is no indication of complete collection size or how often (if ever) the online exhibits change.

There is actually some metadata provided, which surprised me a bit since this is a volunteer operation. Metadata provided includes: title, media, artist (if known), physical size, acquired by whom and where (usually the trash). However, no metadata is provided for the digitization process. There are also some wonderfully funny visual analyses and art historical interpretations of each piece. The fact that they have what they do, though, makes the site look more professional and serious, and thus makes the whole thing funnier.

The digital images range in size and quality. They are generally fairly small jpeg images, but some have enlarged detail images. Some pieces have flash glares, so high-quality image capture was obviously not a very high priority. You see the art well enough to know it is bad, but its not a close enough view to really make you cringe at the quality of it.

The audience is the general public. Anyone with an interest in art or art history would especially appreciate it. This is oviously not a scholarly subject and is a tongue-in-cheek site, and the mock-scholarly approach is part of the gag.