Finally, a museum that's completely honest about the items it displays. Boston's Museum of Bad Art is exactly that, housing the country's finest collection of lousy, kitschy, and tacky artwork. Since its founding in 1994, MOBA has aspired to bring the worst of art to the widest of audiences, and they've succeeded beyond all expectations with a collection of bad art divided into portraiture, landscape, and "unseen forces," which describes amorphous shapes and blobs. If you're wondering what exactly, bad art is, the short answer is that you know it when you see it, but the museum's guiding principle states that it can 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." To wit, the museum was first inspired by the discovery in a trash pile of "Lucy In the Field With Flowers," (pictured) which is bad art by all definition. Painted by an unknown artist, the subject is somehow depicted in motion while sitting in a chair in a field (perhaps an earthquake is moving the chair?), against a bizarre, swirling green-and-yellow sky. It almost brings a tear to the eye. Guests at the nearby Four Points by Sheraton Norwood or Sheraton Needham Hotel might want to drop by this quirky gallery to discover how great bad art can be.
[image via the Museum of Bad Art]
