300(ish) Words on Bad Art
I recently started painting as a way to heal my relationship with writing, mostly by avoiding the anxiety of not having written. As a new hobbyist, I’ve begun considering Bad Art.
Bad Art doesn’t necessarily reference technique or skill, rather a genre of oblivious expression.
Bad Art is easier to make then good art. Bad Art is melodramatic, too sure of its meaning, dark for the sake of being dark, using the recognizable archetypes of good art — beautiful women, naked women (guilty), flowers, sunsets — to mask its badness. It’s the leftover canvases of a one-time hobbyist that you find at Goodwill. It’s not a rule, but Bad Art is usually painted in acrylics.
Bad Art is a spectrum, and there are extremes: gritty, overedited, oversaturated photos of a broken-down truck or a girl in heavy makeup staring off into the distance. Realistic, aspiring visual art with out-of-whack proportions or a dead smile with blank eyes; the pencil drawings teens make of their favorite celebrities.
Creating Bad Art is not the same as being bad at sports or cooking, or even bad at making love. Because by making art of any kind, you assert your right to express, your right to a voice. Maybe the thing that comes closest to Bad Art is bad poetry.
And if the art is bad, you’re asserting your right to a voice without the self-awareness that is usually crucial to that responsibility. Bad Art is like the party guest who can’t tell he’s rambling to an uninterested party. It is absolutely the standup comic bombing — in fact, Bad Art is anything that makes you cringe for the creator, that they dare put this thing out in the world without an inch of hesitation, doubt, or self-examination. Bad Art is audacious.
I’m hating on Bad Art, but it’s true that it has its redeeming qualities. I am jealous of the earnestness and baldness with which Bad Art is put out into the world. I am jealous of the brains of bad artists who aren’t paralyzed by the reception of their creations and of the starry-eyedness that they still retain despite living in this world. In fact, some of the artists I cringe at most are successful just by way of believing in themselves — the truest, most cliché art form of all.
Taylor Prewitt is a writer, a Taurus, and a real housewife of life. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, and VICE. Photos courtesy of Museum of Bad Art.
