This past weekend, the Biscuit and his friend Mr. Osbourne and I visited the Museum of Bad Art (also known as the MoBA) in Dedham, Massachusetts. The trip out to Dedham turned into a minor odyssey; apparently, the directions I printed out from the MoBA Web site constituted part of the exhibit, because despite their grandiose wording, the directions did not do a whole lot in the way of directing. We meandered along for quite some time on the suburban parkway system south of Boston, pointed directly into the blinding glare of the afternoon sun, and while Mr. Osbourne tried not to stray into oncoming traffic, I pulled my hat down over my face like Mushmouth from Fat Albert to block the rays and hunted in vain for a decent radio station to drown out the sound of sizzling retinas. After nearly an hour in the car, we arrived in Dedham and spotted the Dedham Community Theater, home of the MoBA’s “permanent collection.” By this time, after sloshing across the parking lot and skating down the sidewalk and posing for “living bad art” photos under the theater marquee, we didn’t just want to see bad art – we wanted to see wretchedly, pitiably, spectacularly bad art. We did not leave disappointed. Among the highlights:

1. “Sunday On The Pot With George,” a pointillist painting of a man sitting on the toilet. This work delighted me, not just because of the pun on “Sunday In The Park With George,” or because it depicted a man pinching a loaf, but because the man still had his underwear on for some reason. (The location of the work – the first painting on the stairs down to the basement, stairs which also led to the theater’s men’s room – also contributed to its hilarity.) Inexplicable, irredeemable art.

2. “Mama And Babe,” a family portrait rendered in lurid acrylic color, put a contemporary – not to mention unattractive – twist on the traditional Madonna-and-child genre. “Mama” and “Babe” look roughly the same age; they also both look like pigs.

3. “Pablo Presley.” The twinkling stars in the background, the natty polka-dotted lapels of his jacket, the toreador mustache – these details make the portrait of The King as a Latino nothing short of unforgettable. These details also make the portrait bad. (No, not in the velvet medium.)

4. “Pals.” On the one hand, we have “clown art,” which I loathe, because clowns freak me right out and they always have. On the other hand, we have “clown art” in which the clown has a day’s growth of beard and looks like my old boss, and in which the clown also has a monkey with false eyelashes and a come-hither look perched on his lap, tickling his chin. Only the amateurish rendering and the monkey’s blasÈ expression prevented this painting from giving me nightmares.

5. “Hello My Name Is.” I actually respected the idea behind this work. The artist painted a board to look like a name-tag, with the words “Hello My Name Is” written in red across the top of a white background; in the space where the name would ordinarily appear, the artist placed an open copy of the white pages that had evidently caught on fire, and the snarl of charred paper in the middle had formed a heart shape. Alas, the name-tag part of the piece looked like a four-year-old had painted it, which sort of sapped it of its power – that, and the fact that anyone with a board, some poster paints, and an outdated white pages could have created the same “art” in about ten minutes.

6. “The Athlete,” a nearly life-sized likeness of an Olympian, drawn in crayon. The athlete wears a pink toga, sweatsocks, and black brogans, and has perfectly spherical calf muscles.

I could go on and on – the portrait of a woman wearing only a hairbow and go-go boots, milking a unicorn. The painting of a nymph frolicking amongst the mushrooms on the forest floor. The visible Scotch-tape repair jobs. The placard announcing, “These premises protected by fake video cameras.” The melodious sound of the hydraulic flush from the adjacent men’s room. And though we derived great pleasure from the art itself, we got our biggest chuckles from the accompanying text next to each piece; each blurb delivered thinly veiled insults in the guise of delightfully earnest critique. About “Sunday On The Pot With George,” for example, the curator mused, “The pointillist piece is curious for meticulous attention to fine detail . . . coupled with an almost careless disregard for the subject’s feet.” The attribution notes on several pieces read, “Bequest from the public refuse system.”

In its literature, the MoBA claims to celebrate the right of all artists to fail, and I believe that they’ve succeeded in this. The artists whose work I saw displayed – in particular, the artist whose self-portrait depicted her as a rabid owl with razor-sharp canines and Lennon glasses – had failed sensationally. But as I inspected a piece in the Day-Glo fingerpaint-and-paper medium entitled “More,” it struck me that I couldn’t really pinpoint what exactly made this art “bad.” Occasionally, Big A invites me to earn some quick cash by tending bar at the gallery he works for in Chelsea; the gallery specializes in American Primitive art, which covers everything from quilts to sculptures made from iron baby-doll factory molds to watercolors painted on shirt-box cardboard. The works at the gallery frequently fetch thousands of dollars, and frankly, I didn’t see a huge gap in ability between the works at the MoBA and the ones hanging in the gallery. From what I understand, for a work of art to qualify as an American Primitive, the artist who created it must work in a non-traditional or informal medium and must have had little or no formal artistic training. I may very well have that wrong, but if I have it right, when does art cross the line from American Primitive to out-and-out bad? If a member of the art community, with a firm command of its terms, translates a demonstrated lack of skill into “a stunning inversion of traditional spatial discourse,” does bad art then become good?

I do understand the difference between the exhibits at the MoBA and those at the MoMA. The Museum of Bad Art showcases pieces that suck on almost every level – trite or pointlessly weird subject matter, comically poor execution, inappropriate media, and so on. But as a card-carrying member of the “I know what I like” school of art appreciation, I can’t really call the art at the MoBA “bad.” I can’t call it “good,” either, clearly, but first of all, if I call the art at the MoBA bad, I have to dismiss a number of accredited artists as bad also: Warhol’s most famous paintings didn’t require technical mastery; the idea behind the composition of a Bleckner matters more than the dexterity of the composition itself; Haring and Basquiat differentiated themselves from other gifted graffiti artists by associating themselves with the terms I mentioned before. I enjoy the work of all of these artists, and I don’t feel that they don’t deserve the acclaim they’ve received, but that brings me to my second point – if I like the art, and it makes me think about the nature of art and about the ways in which we talk about art, can I still call it “bad”? Don’t we define “art” as a deeply personal means of representation and revelation? Doesn’t “art” rely on the intent of the artist and the viewer (or listener, or reader)? In other words, bad art is still art, and if it affects its audience in any way, it has still done its job as art. Snickering and pretentious goatee-stroking both count.

Wandering through the basement gallery under the clanking steam pipes, I remembered the “readings” my friend Lord Monroe used to give in college. Lord Monroe, who had a number of theories involving the Sophoclean nature of Melrose Place, would pick up a perfectly mundane piece of writing – a YM piece on crushes, for instance, or the back of a bottle of Crazy Horse malt liquor – and render it dramatically for us, imbuing every line break with poetic portent. When he puffed out his chest and recited the Surgeon General’s warning, we would all giggle, but it did in fact sound like poetry. My point? Well, just because someone decided to call something “good,” or to use the terminology of “good” things to describe something essentially bad, doesn’t make it good; just because someone decided to label something “bad” doesn’t make it bad. Even looking at something bad and thinking to yourself, “Whew – BAAAD,” as I did several dozen times last weekend, doesn’t make it bad. If it gets a good reaction, can we still call it bad?

If we don’t have to pay so much as one thin dime for admission, no, we cannot call it bad. Not thoroughly bad, anyway.

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